One thing that’s special about humans is the way we express ourselves through art and music. Ancient humans were no different. The art they left on cave walls and carved in stone lives on. It gives us a profound connection to our ancestors and their creative, complex lives. In this episode, Ashley Judd explores some of the earliest art ever discovered.
One thing that’s special about humans is the way we express ourselves through art and music. Ancient humans were no different. The art they left on cave walls and carved in stone lives on. It gives us a profound connection to our ancestors and their creative, complex lives. In this episode, Ashley Judd explores some of the earliest art ever discovered.
Further reading:
About The Leakey Foundation
The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries. The Foundation was established in 1968 to fund work at the forefront of fossil and primate studies and provide opportunities for a global community of scientists. Learn more at leakeyfoundation.org.
Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins
In 50 lively and up-to-the-minute essays illustrated with full-color photographs, Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins presents stories of the most exciting and groundbreaking surprises revealed by human origins research.
Prepared in consultation with leading experts and written by Evan Hadingham, senior science editor for NOVA, Discovering Us features stunning photographs, some taken at the actual moment that groundbreaking discoveries were made. The book presents a highly accessible account of the latest scientific insights into the ultimate question of humanity’s origins. Discovering Us was published by Signature Books.
Find Discovering Us at your local library, bookstore, or amazon.com.
Show Credits:
Discovering Us was made possible by generous support from Camilla and George Smith, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.
Meredith Johnson:
This is Discovering Us from The Leakey Foundation and Signature Books … an audio companion to the book Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins. Written by Evan Hadingham and read for you by Ashley Judd.
I’m your host, Meredith Johnson.
One thing that’s special about humans is the way we express ourselves through art and music.
Ancient humans were no different. The art they left behind - painted on cave walls, or carved in stone - lives on. It gives us a profound connection to our ancestors and their creative, and complex lives.
In this installment we’ll explore some of the earliest art ever discovered.
Here’s Ashley Judd…
Ashley Judd:
The Lion Man
One of the world’s oldest masterpieces of prehistoric sculpture, the ivory statuette known as the Lion Man is also one of the most enigmatic.
Laboriously hewn from a mammoth tusk around 40,000 years ago, the one-foot-tall creature appears to be standing on its toes, its back and shoulders arched tensely as if waiting to spring into action.
From the neck up, it is unmistakably a cave lion, a formidable Ice Age beast, now extinct, that was bigger than today’s African lion.
From the shoulders down, it is unambiguously human, complete with a navel and particularly realistic calves, ankles, and feet.
According to archaeologist Jill Cook, the statuette is “powerful, mysterious and from a world beyond ordinary nature. He is the oldest known representation of a being that does not exist in physical form but symbolizes ideas about the supernatural.”
The survival of this statuette is little short of a miracle, as was its reconstruction from hundreds of ivory fragments over the course of half a century. The story begins on August 25, 1939, one week before the outbreak of World War Two.
Prehistorian Robert Wetzel had just received his military call-up papers and he and a colleague were scrambling to finish their final day of digging at Stadel Cave near the Danube River in southwest Germany.
In a dark chamber at the back of the cave, they came across the ivory shards. Not knowing when, or if, they wouldbe able to return, they backfilled their excavation with the dirt they had just dug up before hastily retreating with their find.
For three decades, the pieces of the statuette lay neglected in a cigar box in the city of Ulm’s museum until archaeologist Joachim Hahn (yo-ah-kheem hahn) began studying finds from the cave in 1969.
He started the marathon process by gluing together more than 200 pieces of ivory, and, after a few days, he recognized the figure he was assembling as a hybrid of beast and human, although what kind of beast was not clear.
After fresh reconstruction efforts in the 1980s, enough of the head emerged to reveal its identity as a lion.
In 2009, archaeologist Claus-Joachim Kind systematically re-excavated the cave.
He was surprised to discover nearly 600 more ivory scraps in the backfill dirt left behind by Wetzel.
It took two more years to solve the immense challenge of restoring the statuette to the state we see today.
The original carvers of the figurine expended equally impressive effort. A recent experiment using replica stone tools of the period suggests that it must have taken some 400 hours to hew the figure from the tough mammoth ivory.
This was clearly an extraordinary undertaking for anyone living in a hunting community, and implies that the figure embodied special social and symbolic significance.
In 2002, archaeologist Nicholas Conard found a “Little Lion Man”—a similar ivory figure, but only an inch high—at the cave of Hohle Fels, 25 miles from Stadel.
The recurrence of the Lion Man motif suggests it may be connected with a widespread myth—perhaps the transformation of humans into animal spirits that is a central preoccupation of shamanism, often considered to be humanity’s most ancient strand of religious belief.
Other intriguing beast-men hybrids are depicted in painted Ice Age cave art, such as a striking figure of a part man/ part bison from Chauvet and a celebrated “birdman” figure at Lascaux.
These painted images are located in dark, secluded parts of the caves; similarly, northern-facing Stadel Cave receives little light, and the recess where Lion Man was discovered contained no tools or other signs of regular occupation. This raises the possibility that all these symbols could mark the site of some type of rite or celebration.
Although uniquely impressive, the Lion Man is one of many finds that testify to an extraordinary flowering of creativity among the first wave of modern humans to settle in the Danube region around 40,000 years ago.
In addition to Little Lion Man, exquisite miniature ivory animals, their surfaces polished to a shine by constant handling, have been found at Hohle Fels as well as two other caves close by.
In 2008, Conard’s team found the so-called “Venus of Hohle Fels,” the world’s oldest female figurine, her ample proportions as striking as the austere pose of the Lion Man.
They also unearthed a delicate flute perforated with five finger holes, the most complete of several such instruments from the local caves, all of them intricately crafted from mammoth ivory tusks or the wing bones of swans or vultures.
When modern flautists play an accurate copy of the Hohle Fels flute, they produce haunting notes that suggest well-developed musical expertise.
Unlike the Lion Man at Stadel, the flutes and miniature animals were found mixed in with everyday refuse rather than in an apparently special setting.
While these objects are the world’s first evidence of musical instruments and figurative sculpture, they are anything but primitive. Instead, they were clearly part of a complex, fully developed world of symbolic communication. They express feelings and beliefs that are recognizable today, even if their exact meanings remain elusive.
[MUSIC rises and then ducks under closing credits]
Meredith Johnson:
Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins was written for The Leakey Foundation by Evan Hadingham. It was published by Signature Books. The stories are read for you by Ashley Judd.
All the episodes of this audio-companion are available to listen to right now! Make sure to subscribe and share this series with a friend.
You can buy a copy of Discovering Us at your local bookstore or wherever you buy books. There’s a link in the shownotes.
The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries. The science you heard about today was made possible by Leakey Foundation supporters. Visit our website to learn how you can get involved. Go to leakeyfoundation.org. That’s l-e-a-k-e-y foundation dot org.
This project was made possible by generous support from Camilla and George Smith, the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation