Last spring, the artist Mike Nelson went on holiday for a week to the southwest of France. The weather was awful and, on a particularly unforgiving day, when the rain was all but horizontal, he and his partner, the artist Rachel Lowe, and the friends they were staying with took shelter in a small, brutalist museum in the village of Tautavel. The museum, it turned out, was dedicated to the 450,000-year-old Tautavel Man, an ancestor of the Neanderthals, whose remains — the oldest ever found in France — were discovered in a limestone cave, alongside stone tools and animal bones.
“It was just us in the museum and nobody else, and all this Neolithic stuff around us, and these sand-like vistas, and I was thinking, ‘My god,’” says the Loughborough-born…
