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."