Lion man

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The Lion Man after the 2012/13 restoration The Lion Man after the 2012/13 restoration
The Lion Man after the 2012/13 restoration

The Lion Man by Hohlenstein-Stadel in Lone Valley is a 31.1 cm wide and from 35,000 to 41,000-year-old sculpture of mammoth - ivory that a man with the head and the limbs of a cave lion represents. The sculpture comes from the Upper Palaeolithic culture of Aurignacia and is one of the oldest small works of art known to man.

Find history and reconstruction

The fragments of the lion man were discovered in 1939 by Otto Völzing in the barn , one of the three karst caves in the Hohlenstein near Asselfingen ( Swabian Alb ). The excavations were directed by the Tübingen anatomist Robert Wetzel . The fragments of the lion man were recovered on August 25, 1939, shortly before the excavation ended prematurely. Since the investigations were discontinued in view of the beginning of the war on September 1st, the excavation remained in the cave.

It was not until December 1969 that the prehistorian Joachim Hahn discovered, when attempting to put together the more than 260 ivory fragments, of which he could only accommodate about 200, that the object was a hybrid of man and big cat, probably a cave lion .

It could not be clarified whether the figure represents a male or female person. While Hahn assumed that it was a man, the Basel paleontologist Elisabeth Schmid was convinced that it was a female figure. Kurt Wehrberger , head of the archaeological department at the Museum Ulm, defused the ensuing debate by describing the statuette as a "lion man" in 1987.

Other small fragments of the figure were found by walkers in the cave in 1974 and 1975, as well as when Robert Wetzel's study was dissolved at the University of Tübingen . Therefore, from 1987 to 1988, all matching parts were reassembled in the restoration workshop of the Württemberg State Museum under the guidance of paleontologist Elisabeth Schmid. One of the newly added parts could be adapted to the left foot, the second turned out to be part of the previously missing snout with the deeply indented mouth. Only then did the figure clearly show the face of a big cat. The assembly in the workshops of the Württemberg State Museum took about six months. In this reconstruction, presented from 1988, individual fragments of the right arm were not adapted to the figure. Since large parts of the right shoulder were still missing, too free an interpretation should be avoided.

During excavations by the State Office for Monument Preservation under the direction of Claus-Joachim Kind in the Hohlenstein-Stadel, the site of the lion man was rediscovered in 2009. From 2010 to 2012, more fragments of the lion man's neck and back were recovered from the rubble of the 1939 excavation. They were initially adjusted virtually, i. H. the figure was digitized using X-ray computed tomography , the digital model was then broken down into its individual parts and then put back together virtually.

The most recent match from 2013, before all parts were disassembled again, shows the lion man in a size of 31.1 instead of 29.6 cm as before. About 80 of the newly found parts that are still in the museum could be added under the direction of Nicole Ebinger-Rist. The dating of bones in the immediate vicinity of the site made it possible to narrow down the age to 41,000 to 35,000 years ago.

The elongated neck and the adaptation of the previously isolated right arm, which was achieved with the help of the parts of the right shoulder that are now available, are striking. The investigations have also shown that the triangular leaflet is "carved on all sides and clearly separated from the pubic area" in front of the lion man's step. From this the excavators concluded that it must have been a man.

The 2011 photo clearly shows the incisions on the left upper arm, as well as the fact that a number of parts were still missing.

There are seven horizontal, parallel notches on the left upper arm, which may indicate a tattoo or decorative scars. In addition, the left ear has "more than a dozen transverse, fine incisions". "The sole of the left foot also seems to be decorated with lines."

In contrast to other finds, which were mostly scattered in the remains of the settlement, the lion man was found in an isolated chamber, away from the settlement activities. There pendants made of ivory and pierced teeth of red deer, fox and wolf were discovered. There were hardly any stone tools in the chamber, nor were there any other traces of everyday life. The chamber may have been reserved for ritual acts.

Importance of the find

The lion man is the oldest known work of art that possibly depicts a mythical creature . It is also conceivable that a shaman is depicted using the fur of a lion with its head and hind legs as part of a ritual. The majority of the small works of art from the Aurignacien show animal figures, although two other possible animal-human hybrid beings are known: In 2004 a "little brother" (approx. 2.5 cm high) of the lion man was found in the hollow rock near Schelklingen in the Ach Valley . This could indicate a kind of ritual community between the inhabitants of the two sites. The so-called “Adorant” from the Geißenklösterle also seems to represent a hybrid of a human and a big cat.

In addition to the lion man, statuettes made of mammoth ivory were found in only three other caves in the Swabian Alb (Geißenklösterle and Hohler Fels near Schelklingen, Vogelherd cave in the Lone valley), which are to be placed in the same section of Aurignaciens and - apart from a few outliers - always with uncalibrated 14 C dates can be dated between 31,000 and 33,000 BP . Dating between 33,000 and 36,000 BP lie in an interval in which 14 C dates do not depict any real time dimension. Therefore, a temporally and spatially limited phenomenon of only one to two thousand years can be assumed, in which a specific art form of an Ice Age culture was developed, which was developed or brought with them by the early representatives of Homo sapiens in Europe. All other animal figures, such as the Venus vom Hohlefels found in 2008, are less than 10 cm tall and therefore much smaller than the lion man, but the said Venus figurine belongs to the same era, as it was dated between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago.

Today's presentation

In 1956, the excavation manager Robert Wetzel donated all of his excavation finds from the Lone Valley to the city of Ulm. They are the property of the city of Ulm. The original is part of the permanent exhibition in the Museum Ulm , where the lion man has been presented since it was first assembled in the early 1970s.

Information center

In May 2007 a new information center "The Lion Man's Cave" was opened near Lindenau - only a few hundred meters from the Hohlenstein site. In addition to a film, a multimedia portal and several display boards provide information about the history of the lion man.

Exhibitions

  • 2009/2010, special exhibition "The Lion Man - The Experiment" , Ulmer Museum: The focus here was on a lion man carved under authentic conditions. The copy was made by archaeotechnician Wulf Hein, who needed a total of 320 working hours to carve with flint tools. In 2010 this exhibition - with additional palaeolithic ivory objects from the University of Erlangen - was shown in the Erlangen City Museum.
  • 2013/2014, special exhibition The Return of the Lion Man. History - Myth - Magic , Ulmer Museum: with the current reconstruction . An accompanying publication to the exhibition was initially published in English.

See also

literature

  • Ulmer Museum (Ed.): The Return of the Lion Man - History Myth Magic. Ulm 2013, ISBN 978-3-7995-0542-0 .
  • Jill Cook: Ice Age Art: the Arrival of the Modern Mind. [... to accompany the exhibition of the British Museum from 7 February to 26 May 2013]. British Museum Press, London 2013, ISBN 978-0-7141-2333-2 .
  • Nicole Ebinger-Rist, Claus-Joachim Kind , Sibylle Wolf, Kurt Wehrberger: The lion man gets a new face. Finding and restoring the ivory statuette from the Stadel cave in the Hohlenstein. In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg . Volume 42, Issue 4, 2013, pp. 194–200.
  • H. Müller-Beck, NJ Conard, W. Schürle (Ed.): Ice Age Art, Beginnings of Art. Theiss, ISBN 3-8062-1674-6 .
  • Nicholas J. Conard : Head start through art: The happiness of new people. If we could meet them, Neanderthals would be strange. Not because of their appearance, but because their culture and communication were different. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Nature and Science, Wednesday, February 8, 2017, No. 33, p. N2.
  • Ulmer Museum (ed.): The lion man. Animals and humans in the art of the Ice Age. Volume accompanying the exhibition (1994).
  • Ulmer Museum (ed.): The lion man. History - Magic - Myth. Ulm 2005.
  • Claus-Joachim Kind, Nicole Ebinger-Rist, Sibylle Wolf, Thomas Beutelspacher, Kurt Wehrberger: The Smile of the Lion Man. Recent Excavations in Stadel Cave (Baden-Württemberg, south-western Germany) and the Restoration of the Famous Upper Palaeolithic Figurine. In: Quaternary. International yearbook for research into the Ice Age and the Stone Age. No. 61, 2014, pp. 129–145 ( digitized version ).
  • Nicholas J. Conard, Claus-Joachim Kind: When man invented art: Ice Age Caves in the Swabian Alb , Theiss Verlag (WBG), 2017, p. 90 ff.
  • Claus-Joachim Kind, State Office for Monument Preservation in the Stuttgart Regional Council (ed.): Löwenmensch and more - The excavations 2008-2013 in the Paleolithic layers of the Stadel Cave in the Hohlenstein (Lonetal), Asselfingen municipality, Alb-Danube district. In: Research and reports on archeology in Baden-Württemberg, Volume 15, Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden 2019, ISBN 978-3-95490-409-9 .

Web links

Commons : Lion Man  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claus-Joachim Kind: The Lone Valley - a world-class Paleolithic find landscape , in: Archeology in Germany 06 | 2016, pp. 22–25, here: p. 24.
  2. ↑ The Lion Man's Cave at Lonetal.net.
  3. ^ Kurt Wehrberger: The lion man. The ivory statuette from the Lone Valley near Ulm. In: Leif Steguweit (Hrsg.): People of the Ice Age: Hunters - Craftsmen - Artists. Praehistorika, Fürth 2008, ISBN 978-3-937852-01-0 , pp. 45-53 ( PDF download ).
  4. ↑ Kurt Wehrberger: L'Homme-lion de la grotte du Hohlenstein-Stadel / The lion man from the Hohlenstein-Stadel. Les chemins de l'art aurignacien en Europe / The Aurignacien and the beginnings of art in Europe. Colloque international / Internationale Fachagung Aurignac, 16-18 September 2005, Éditions Musée-forum Aurignac, cahier 4, 2007, pp. 331–344.
  5. ↑ Harald Floss : L'art mobilier aurignacien du Jura souabe et sa place dans l'art paleolithique / The cabaret of Aurignacien on the Swabian Alb and its position in paleolithic art. Les chemins de l'art aurignacien en Europe / The Aurignacien and the beginnings of art in Europe. Colloque international / Internationale Fachagung Aurignac, 16-18 September 2005, Éditions Musée-forum Aurignac, cahier 4, 2007, pp. 295–316.
  6. ↑ Robert Wetzel: The hollow stone in the Lone valley. Documents of ancient European cultures from the Ice Age to the Great Migration. In: Messages from the Association for Natural Science and Mathematics in Ulm (Danube). Issue 27, 1961, pp. 21-75.
  7. ^ Joachim Hahn: The position of the male ivory statuette from the Hohlenstein barn in Upper Palaeolithic art. In: Germania. Volume 48, 1970, pp. 1-12.
  8. ↑ Elisabeth Schmid: The Paleolithic ivory statuette from the Stadel cave in the Hohlenstein near Asselfingen, Alb-Donau district. In: Find reports from Baden-Württemberg. Volume 14, 1989, pp. 33-118.
  9. ↑ Thomas Beutelspacher, Nicole Ebinger-Rist, Claus-Joachim Kind: New finds from the barn cave in the Hohlenstein near Asselfingen. In: Archaeological excavations in Baden-Württemberg 2010. Theiss-Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, p. 65.
  10. ↑ Thomas Beutelspacher , Claus-Joachim Kind: In search of fragments of the lion man in the barn cave in the Hohlenstein near Asselfingen. Archaeological excavations in Baden-Württemberg 2011 (2012), pp. 66–71.
  11. ^ Hohlenstein: lion man discovered during excavation. Stuttgart Journal, accessed April 15, 2011.
  12. ↑ a b Lion Man restored: undoubtedly male. Südwest-Presse Ulm, accessed on November 15, 2013.
  13. ↑ Claus-Joachim Kind: The Lone Valley - a world-class Paleolithic find landscape , in: Archeology in Germany 06 | 2016, pp. 22–25, here: p. 24.
  14. ↑ Claus-Joachim Kind: The Lone Valley - a world-class Paleolithic find landscape , in: Archeology in Germany 06 | 2016, pp. 22–25, here: p. 25.
  15. ^ Adorant , Landesmuseum Württemberg (with illustration).
  16. ↑ Nicholas J. Conard : A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany , in: Nature 459 (2009) 248–252 doi : 10.1038 / nature07995 ( online ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. , PDF). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.geo.uni-tuebingen.de
  17. ↑ Finds are the property of the City of Ulm (swp.de, accessed on April 13, 2018)
  18. ↑ Löwenmensch - Trailer ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Website of the city of Ulm, accessed on November 15, 2013) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ulm.de
  19. ↑ Ulmer Museum (ed.): The Return of the Lion Man . Thorbecke, 2013, ISBN 978-3-7995-0543-7 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 32 ′ 57.5 "  N , 10 ° 10 ′ 22.6"  E