Prehistoric Art: The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

Investigators regularly conduct scientific research on Prehistoric Art items in a quest to understand the composition of the artifacts, their origins, their ages, construction techniques, and utility. In this series I am reporting on a subset of these artifacts, continuing herein with the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel.

The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

The British Museum blog describes the Lion Man figurine thusly:

The Lion Man is a masterpiece. Sculpted with great originality, virtuosity and technical skill from mammoth ivory, this 40,000-year-old image is 31 centimeters tall. It has the head of a cave lion with a partly human body. He stands upright, perhaps on tiptoes, legs apart and arms to the sides of a slender, cat-like body with strong shoulders like the hips and thighs of a lion. His gaze, like his stance, is powerful and directed at the viewer. The details of his face show he is attentive, he is watching and he is listening. He is powerful, mysterious and from a world beyond ordinary nature. He is the oldest know representation of a being that does not exist in physical form but symbolizes ideas about the supernatural.

Recovery and Reconstruction

The fragments of the Lion Man figurine were extracted from the Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave in a series of excavations which begun in 1939 and ran on and off through 2013.

Hohlenstein is a large, rocky massif located in Germany's Swabian Jura whose limestone structure has been hollowed out in some areas to form caves, three of which - Stadel, der kleine Scheuer, and Bärenhöhle -- are of archaeological and paleontological significance. The location of the Stadel Cave is indicated on the map below.

The red dot indicates the location of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave

As shown in the timeline below, the first Lion Man fragments were found in the 1939 field season excavations of Robert Wetzel but it was not until the Hahn inventory in 1969 that the significance of the earlier finds was recognized; and not until 2013 that the fullest accounting of the figure was manifested.

Who built the Lion Man

Radiometric tests of Lion-Man-adjacent debris dates the figure to the late Aurignacian, "... a tool culture named after the type site of the Haute-Garonne area in France and noted for its 'mode 4' flint tools characterized by blades from prepared cores, rather than flint blades of earlier man. It was one of the more productive Paleolithic areas in terms of petroglyphs and pictographs produced" (British Museum).

Production of the Lion Man was a very expensive affair for its ownership group. Experiments conducted using the same types of tools employed in his production revealed that 400 hours were required to complete the figure, a significant allocation of time to activity not directly related to physical survival in the harsh environment of the time. This brings two thoughts to the fore:

1. To prehistoric man, there were things that were just as important as physical survival
2. The craftsmanship and belief system associated with the Lion Man did not spring up out of whole cloth at the time of the creation of the figurine.

Use of the Lion Man Figurine

According to the British Museum blog, the Lion Man fragments were found in a small chamber at the back of the cave, somewhat removed from the habitable area at the cave's entrance.The figurine was carefully put away in the dark in the company of a few perforated arctic fox teeth with a cache of reindeer antlers and unmodified cave bear bones proximate.

As regards the cave, it did no set up well for human habitation:

• The cave faces north and does not get much sun. This lack of warmth would limit its attractiveness as a habitable abode.
• The density of human-habitation debris was markedly less than was the case at other nearby sites/

These facts suggest that the cave was a place where people gathered only occasionally. As described by the British Museum, "... Stadel Cave was only used occasionally as a place where people would come together around a fire to share a particular understanding of the world articulated through beliefs, symbolized in sculpture and acted out in rituals." 

Lion Man, then, is the "oldest proof of a numinous belief system among the first anatomically modern humans in Europe."

Research into the origin of the Venus of Willendorf

Investigators regularly conduct scientific research on Prehistoric Art items in a quest to understand the composition of the artifacts, their origins, their ages, construction techniques, and utility. In this series I will report on recently published research on a subset of these artifacts beginning herein with the Venus of Willendorf.

The Venus figurine was discovered in 1908 during the course of archaeological excavations on the left bank of the Danube in Willendorf, Lower Austria. The map below shows the location of the village in which the Venus was first located as well as the city (Vienna) in which it is now housed.

Red blob indicates the village of Willendorf, the
location where the Venus was discovered

The figurine was carved from oolitic limestone ("made up of small spheres called ooiliths that are stuck together by lime mud. They form when calcium carbonate is deposited on the surface of sand grains rolled (by waves) around a shallow sea floor" -- assignmentpoint.com), a formation not local to the Willendorf area. This fact dictates a non-local origin for the Venus. A search for those origins was the basis of the study led by Gerhard Weber and titled "The microstructure and the origin of the Venus of Willendorf."

The first order of study business was determining the structural composition of the Venus. "Because of the unique value of the Venus from Willendorf, one of the most famous signs of early modern human symbolic behaviour, invasive investigations have been impossible since its discovery in 1908. The availability of micro-computed tomography provided the first chance to radiograph the figure in 3D in a resolution close to thin-sections and microscopy, which paved the way to explore the interior of the raw material" Weber, et al. Analysis of the scan data allowed researchers to establish a profile of the material comprising the Venus and to date the oolites as originating in the Mesozoic age (251 - 66 mya)

The second step in the process was to compare this baseline against oolitic limestone samples drawn from France, Ukraine, Crimea, Germany, Sicily, and Sega di Ala, a location in a side valley of Lake Garda. According to the authors, the samples from Sega di Ala were "indistinguishable from samples drawn from the Venus material." The researchers continue: "Even if we cannot  claim with absolute certainty that the raw material of the Venus originates from a particular locality, the match between the Venus and the Sega di Ala samples is almost perfect and suggests a high probability for the raw material to come from south of the Alps."

The authors simulated travel along two prospective paths from Lake Garda to Willendorf: a 730-km path through the Alps and a 930-km path which bypassed the Alps. 

Simulated potential paths for Venus: Red for the northern path through the Alps, black for the southern, non-Alps route

The authors surmise that the shorter path would only have been undertaken under some type of duress and consider the longer path the most likely route along which the Venus (or its material) was carried. Further, such a journey could have taken years, or even generations, but, in the authors' view, the material was handled carefully along the way.

Key findings here are as follows:

• The Venus is not local to Willendorf
• The material from which it was crafted was sourced from an area south of the Alps and relatively proximate to Sega di Ala
• It is not known whether the Venus was manufactured at its point of origin, somewhere along its travel route, or at its final destination. What is known is that great care was taken of the material/artifact during its transit
• It is quite likely that the transit period was lengthy.

©EverythingElse238

Origins, timeline, and examples of Prehistoric Art

The origins of art history can, according to invaluable.com, be traced back to the Paleolithic era, with the earliest artifacts being rock carvings, engravings, pictorial imagery, sculptures, and stone arrangements. "Art from this period relied on the use of natural pigments and stone carvings to create representations of objects, animals, and rituals that governed a civilization's existence."

What were the origins of this art of the Paleolithic period? In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, Yuval Noah Harari posits four phases in modern human's passage through time and two of those phases are co-incident with major artistic innovations. 

Prior to what Harari refers to as the Cognitive Revolution, biological systems determined mankind's destiny. That is, changes to practices and methods only came about as a result of genetic mutations. The Cognitive Revolution, beginning about 70,000 years ago, resulted in a wave of innovations and new ways of thinking about the world. In this period humankind introduced a number of inventions and, more relevant to the subject at hand, began to spin stories of legends, myths, gods, and religion -- a fictive language, according to Harari. The first artworks may represent mankind's first attempts at  physically manifesting the inhabitants of these stories.

A second major departure for humankind was the transition from hunter-gatherer to more settled communities, afforded by the onset of the Agricultural Revolution. Those settled communities allowed for the creation of surplus as well as the concentration of labor resources, all leading to greater monumentality in the art of the period. These two major shifts, and their impacts, are summarized in the first three panels of the chart below.

 The timeline and types of art that fall into the Prehistoric sphere are depicted in the chart below. Specific examples of this type of art are provided in the second chart following.

©EverythingElse238