The Löwenmensch (Lion-Man): earliest figurative sculpture

Date

c. 41,000–35,000 years ago

Category

Religion & ideology

Region

Central Europe (Germany, Swabian Jura)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

Carved from a single mammoth tusk and recovered in fragments from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany, the Löwenmensch ('Lion-Man') depicts a standing human body with the head of a cave lion.

Standing about 31 cm tall, it is the oldest known uncontested figurative sculpture and the oldest zoomorphic carving in the world, associated with the Aurignacian culture and dated by radiocarbon of its archaeological layer to roughly 35,000-41,000 years ago. Because it fuses human and animal forms, the figurine is widely read as evidence of symbolic, mythological or religious thought, the visual representation of a being that does not exist in nature. Producing it would have required hundreds of hours of skilled work, implying that early Upper Paleolithic communities supported specialist craft and shared imaginative concepts. A second, smaller lion-headed figurine from nearby Hohle Fels suggests the image was a recurring theme rather than a one-off.

Related religion & ideology events

• Mungo Lady: the earliest known human cremation
  c. 42,000 years ago
• Construction of the White Temple and Anu Ziggurat at Uruk
  c. 3500 BCE
• Neanderthal mortuary behaviour at Shanidar Cave
  c. 75,000 – 60,000 years ago
• Plastered ancestral skulls of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B
  c. 10,500 – 9,000 years ago (c. 8800–7000 BCE)
• Composition of the Rigveda
  c. 1500-1200 BCE
• Akhenaten's Atenist revolution and the Amarna period
  c. 1348 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Religion

The wider story

A Little History of Religion

Richard Holloway

Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.

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