The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel: The First Imagined Being

On 25 August 1939, in the last days of an excavation in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Lone valley of southern Germany, the geologist Otto Völzing recovered a mass of broken mammoth ivory from the back of the cave. The dig, led by the anatomist Robert Wetzel, was closed a week later when the Second World War began, and the fragments went into storage in Ulm unrecognised. Thirty years later they were found to belong to a single figure: a standing body with a lion's head. It is one of the oldest known sculptures in the world, and one of the oldest images of something no one has ever seen: a being that is part human, part animal.

The figure

• About 31 centimetres tall, carved from a mammoth tusk, using the tusk's curve for the body.
• It stands upright on two legs, arms at its sides, with the head, ears and muzzle of a cave lion. Carved lines cross its left arm.
• The find layer belongs to the Aurignacian, the culture of the first modern humans in Europe, and is dated by radiocarbon to roughly 41,000–35,000 years ago.
• An experiment by the archaeologist and craftsman Wulf Hein, working with stone tools on fresh ivory, suggested that carving it took a very long time, perhaps hundreds of hours.

Rebuilt over seventy years

The interactive timeline above follows the reconstruction. Joachim Hahn assembled more than 200 fragments into a figure in 1969. More pieces were added in the 1980s, when Elisabeth Schmid also suggested the figure might be female. Between 2009 and 2012 excavators returned to the cave, led by Claus-Joachim Kind, and sifted the old spoil heaps, recovering hundreds more fragments. After a full restoration in 2013 the figure was shown in its most complete form. In 2017 the cave became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura.

The new excavations found that the figure had lain in a chamber at the back of the cave, away from the living area, together with pierced animal teeth and ornaments. This suggests a special place, though what was done there is not known.

Symbology and sacred encoding

A being between kinds. A human body with an animal head is called a therianthrope. Such beings appear in the religious art of many later cultures, from the animal-headed gods of Egypt (ch02) to shamanic masks. The Lion Man shows that imagining them is extremely old. Whether it was a god, a spirit, a shaman in costume, a character in a story or something else cannot be known.

The lion. The cave lion was the most powerful predator of Ice Age Europe. Choosing it may have meant strength or danger, but that is interpretation.

Male or female? The figure was long called the "Lion Man". Some researchers have read it as female ("Lion Woman"); others see no clear sex. The question is open.

Connections

Palaeolithic Prehistory (ch41). Compare the Venus of Willendorf (V59), a little younger, and Göbekli Tepe (V60), where carved animals and human figures appear again some 25,000 years later.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/lion-man.html