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I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics, actually, for a living.

It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees.

By the actions of both our prehistoric, largely Pleistocene environments, where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved.

The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship.

This object was made by a hominid ancestor -- Homo erectus or Homo ergaster -- between 50 and 100,000 years before language.

The first of these is natural selection -- that's random mutation and selective retention -- along with our basic anatomy and physiology -- the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails.

It's in the eye of the beholder.

But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this.

We need to reverse engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds.

The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship.

The first of these is natural selection -- that's random mutation and selective retention -- along with our basic anatomy and physiology -- the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails.

And we get it, not from a philosopher of art, not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic.

Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today.

The first of these is natural selection -- that's random mutation and selective retention -- along with our basic anatomy and physiology -- the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails.

Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff.

It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees.

These Acheulian hand axes -- they're named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century -- have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed.

But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances.

I mean just think of the sheer variety -- a baby's face, Berlioz's "Harold in Italy", movies like "The Wizard of Oz", or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Der Rosenkavalier", a stunning match winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's "Starry Night", a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen.

The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix.

From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts.

So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful.

Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction.

I mean just think of the sheer variety -- a baby's face, Berlioz's "Harold in Italy", movies like "The Wizard of Oz", or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Der Rosenkavalier", a stunning match winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's "Starry Night", a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen.

Natural selection also explains pleasures -- sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs.

Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff.

These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in, what are to our eyes, an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form.

This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory.

So evolution's trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them.

I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes.

Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease.

These Acheulian hand axes -- they're named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century -- have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed.