ART × BELIEFS

The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

~40,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

A figure with the head and upper body of a cave lion and the legs of a human being, carved from a single mammoth tusk, was recovered in 1939 at Hohlenstein-Stadel, a cave in the Lone valley of the Swabian Jura, in Germany. It came out of the ground as nearly two hundred fragments of ivory. Excavations from 2008 to 2013 matched the 1939 find spot to the Aurignacian horizon of the cave and recovered 575 more ivory fragments from the spoil of that first dig, some of them belonging to the figure. Refitted in 2012 and 2013, the Lion Man recovered its snout, its back and its right side, grew in volume, and proved to represent a male. The excavators read the way it lay in the cave as a deliberate deposit.

Why it matters

An animal-headed human is nothing anyone could have observed, so the object records a being that its makers had assembled in thought before assembling it in ivory. Evidence of that kind differs from the carving of an animal one can watch. The ivory of the cave also carries the same trace-element signature as the ivory worked at Hohle Fels nearby, which sets these objects within one region and one workshop tradition instead of leaving them isolated. What the figure meant stays out of reach, and readings of it as myth or as shamanism can be tested against nothing.

Dating & uncertainty

The figure has not been dated directly: its age comes from the layer, and the layer was identified after the fact, the 1939 find spot having been matched to the Aurignacian horizon only by the excavations of 2008 to 2013. Published ages put it at about 40,000 to 39,000 years; electron spin resonance on tooth enamel from that horizon gives 34,000 +/- 11,000 years, agreeing with the radiocarbon dates but far looser. What is contested is the rank rather than the age: therianthropes painted at Leang Bulu' Sipong on Sulawesi are dated to at least 43,900 years, so the Lion Man holds the record for a carved figure, not for the idea itself.

Sources

1. Wolf et al. (2020), Camera Praehistorica · What the recent restoration of the Lion Man figurine of Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave tells us about its treatment in the Early Upper Palaeolithicdoi:10.31250/2658-3828-2020-2-58-66
2. Aubert et al. (2019), Nature · Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric artdoi:10.1038/s41586-019-1806-y
3. Richard et al. (2020), Quaternary International · The Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Hohlenstein-Stadel cave (Swabian Jura, Germany): A comparison between ESR, U-series and radiocarbon datingdoi:10.1016/j.quaint.2019.04.009
4. Reiche et al. (2026), Minerals · Non-Invasive Trace Element Fingerprinting of the Lion Man, a Left Mammoth Tusk and Mammoth Ivory Fragments Found at the Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave, Swabian Alb, Germanydoi:10.3390/min16070755

Our species’ history as one day

20:57:083 h 3 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day