Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500

Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its cave, most likely because the pattern of lines and holes on its surface looked beguilingly like a face. Perhaps this was the birth of art.

Or perhaps not. Maybe art arrived in this world later. One day in 1940 Marcel Ravidat was walking in the Dordogne when his dog, Robot, fell into a hole. Robot had stumbled across the entrance to a network of caves containing more than 600 wall and ceiling paintings of horses, deer, aurochs, ibex, bison and cats dating from 17,000 to 15,000 BCE. The discovery of Lascaux’s caves in the era of the Holocaust and Hiroshima resonated for many. ‘Light is being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us,’ said Georges Bataille in his 1955 lecture on prehistoric art entitled ‘A Meeting at Lascaux’.

Desmond Morris, the anthropologist and author of the bestselling The Naked Ape, has another idea about when art began. ‘They say that Lascaux was the birth of art. It was not,’ says Morris. ‘It was the adolescence.’ Art was practised before humans existed. The ape brain has an aesthetic sense that can be expressed given the chance and, you’d suppose, some praise in the form of bananas.

Morris experienced a rerun of the birth of art in the mid-1950s during his three-year experiment into apes’ brains at London Zoo. ‘One chimp was called Charlie and he lived up to his name. He wasn’t very bright,’ Morris recalls. ‘But the other was called Congo. And he was a genius. He was the Leonardo of chimp painting.’

By the age of four, Congo had completed 400 abstract, expressionist paintings. Which shows how pathetic humans are: even Mozart only wrote his first music aged five.