Why 15,000-year-old art might have been displayed in firelight

THE BRITISH MUSEUM has in its care more than 8m artefacts. Visitors can see a mere 80,000 of them or so on display at any one time. Partly that is a blunt matter of space and variety. Few museums can display all they have and many cycle through their collections to give visitors new experiences on successive visits. But it is also about context. Curators have plenty of prehistoric objects in the basement that they know to be significant and interesting, even if they do not know what those objects were for.