I suspect it’s more a problem about longevity of the artifacts, rather than lack of talent or knowing one can pick up some mud and form a shape.

They had very similar general intelligence and talents as us, at that time, and tens of thousand of years before. Today, it’s not terribly hard to find artistic kids who can mold extremely good faces, ponies, or whatever else they choose, from a lump of play dough. I assume artistic people existed then too, with comparable talent and frequency, unless there was some catastrophic non-artist pruning that happened very very recently.