Prehistoric Renaissance: how Renaissance artists found a fascination for Paleolithic objects. From the article:

Jean Fouquet’s “The Melun Diptych” (c. 1455) is one of the Northern Renaissance’s most iconic — and creepiest — paintings. The work comprises two oil-on-wood panels: One features an unsettling depiction of a ghostly white, heavily idealized Virgin Mary, and the other shows patron Étienne Chevalier kneeling alongside Saint Stephen, who grips a book that balances an oddly shaped rock likely in reference to his New Testament martyrdom by stoning. Now, a team of researchers says that this rock was modeled after a human-made handaxe that our Paleolithic ancestors used to cut wood, slice meat, and dig for root vegetables….

The team knew that Fouquet would have had access to these Prehistoric objects, named Acheulean handaxes. His peers in the Medieval society of northern France dug quarries and built abbeys and settlements atop ancient sites. The researchers had also seen these works mentioned in writing. Late Medieval Europeans mistook them for “thunderstones shot from the clouds” during lightning storms, an assumption that persisted until scientists during the Enlightenment uncovered their human-made origins….

“The humanities and the sciences have a lot to learn from one another,” [Prof. Jeremy] De Silva told Hyperallergic. “[They] can collaborate on projects that investigate how humans have understood their world through time.”

For the scholarly publication of their research, see here. 

H/t Richard P. Love