Reading Palaeolithic Art: The Lion-Man
Explaining the ice age lion-man figurine, human-animal hybrids and Aurignacian religion
“The individual who conceived and executed the figurine was clearly capable of abstract thinking. A Löwenmensch, or lion-man, is not a creature of this earth. It melds the cognitively distinct categories of lion and person into a single, abstract entity, endowed no doubt with many features we cannot see. This melding must initially have been the result of an effortful conjunction of information in active attention, and such effortful conjunction is the province of modern executive functions and working memory… The essence-defined, taxonomic distinctions of modern folk biology are also in evidence. ‘Lion’ is a member of a sub-division of ‘animal’, defined almost certainly by the essences of ‘lioness’. Such a folk biology is universal for modern humans, so in this sense at least Aurignacian thinking is very familiar…”
-Hohlenstein-Stadel and the Evolution of Human Conceptual Thought (2009) Wynn et al
In the last piece I wrote about Palaeolithic artwork, we looked at the Chauvet cave ‘Panel of Horses’ - a remarkable study of horses painted onto a prepared surface in a limestone cave around 30,000 years ago. The panel is striking for its naturalism and attention to detail, even more so when you consider the artist had to rely on their memory. This time we’ll look at the opposite type of Palaeolithic artwork. Rather than a static painting of natural phenomena, we instead have a portable ivory figurine representing something more ‘unnatural’.
The Löwenmensch or Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel is amongst the most famous Palaeolithic figurines, made more unusual by the fact that it has been slowly and painstakingly constructed over many decades from pieces of disintegrating and splintered ivory from the same deposition site. The Hohlenstein cave is located in the Swabian Jura mountain range in southern Germany. The area contains multiple limestone caves of incredible archaeological significance which have yielded numerous important artworks, including the Vogelherd horse and the Hohle Fels venus figurine. Hohlenstein itself has layers dating back to the Neanderthals, running through the Neolithic. The Lion-man sculpture was first identified in 1939, after excavations under Robert Wetzel and Otto Völzing. Numerous splintered pieces of ivory were recovered from the same context and then placed into storage. Thankfully their careful preservation meant that archaeologist Joachim Hahn was able to examine them in 1969 and reconstruct them into a figurine, measuring 31cm in height and displaying a curious hybridity between a human and an animal.
Further excavations, restorations and additions have led to the Lion-man being adjusted and further completed: in 1982, 1989 and between 2012-2013. Additional bones were found nearby which dated the layer the figure was found to between 35,000 and 41,000 years ago. This places it within the Aurignacian culture, one of the earliest Homo sapien peoples in Europe, and the first to fully colonise the region whilst the Neanderthals were disappearing. Unlike the Neanderthals, the Aurignacians developed a sophisticated art culture of animal and human figurines, naturalistic cave paintings and symbolic engraved artifacts.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Grey Goose Chronicles to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.