Is the Lion Man a Woman? Solving the Mystery of a 35,000-Year-Old Statue

... The debate remains undecided today. But that could soon change, now that new fragments of the Lion Man have turned up.

The new discoveries came after archeologists once again turned their attention to the Stadel cave. They sifted through all of the rubble from 1939, explains excavator Claus-Joachim Kind -- and the results were sensational. "We found about 1,000 pieces, which presumably belong to the statue," Kind says.

Some of the fragments are tiny, only a few square millimeters in size, but the cache also includes pieces as long as a finger.

The figurine will be taken to the State Conservation Office in Esslingen, near Stuttgart, where it will be completely taken apart. The old glue joints will be dissolved and the filler made of beeswax and chalk, which was used as a placeholder, will be removed.

Photo: Augsburger Allgemeine

Then the statue will be reassembled piece by piece, a task that those involved await with great anticipation. "We will soon be able to view the most mysterious work of art from (the southwestern German state of) Baden-Württemberg in its original form," Kind hopes.

Already it is clear that the figurine will become a few centimeters taller due to new neck pieces that have been found. Furthermore, the gaping hole in the back can now be plugged, and the right arm has been found in its entirety. Additional decorations, including raised dots and strange-looking lines, have come to light.

These new revelations offer a greater insight into the mind of the prehistoric sculptor, who created the figure about 35,000 years ago. His ancestors had migrated to Europe, which had been controlled by the Neanderthals, shortly before.

The statue was found near traces of a fire site in a niche 27 meters (89 feet) from the mouth of the cave. When Kind was working at the site, he also found a decorated deer's tooth, the incisors of an arctic fox and ivory beads. The items could have been pieces from a decorative robe. Perhaps the niche served as a shaman's changing room.

It is considered likely that prehistoric sorcerers wore furs as costumes when they celebrated rituals around the campfire. Hybrid creatures -- half-man, half-beast -- also appear in cave drawings in France... [Read more]

Opinion: The article picks the "Lion-Man or Lion-Woman" angle, but I think a more broadly interesting question is why this time and place had a proliferation of ivory artifacts. The Lion-Man is not the only anthropothere, and the appearance of such images so early in the record of artistic representation would seem to show that such combinations are fundamental to the human imagination. john hawks weblog

Related: 26/27-04-11. New 'lion man' fragments from Hohlenstein-Stadel.

Video: Der Löwenmensch von Asselfingen. Vídeo YouTube (radio7kanal el 14/04/2011) añadido a Paleo Vídeos > Prehistoria Universal > L.R.2.3

Especiales: Paleo Venus: Alemania