ART

The Oldest Human Figurine

~40,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

Six fragments of mammoth ivory, found in 2008 at the base of the Aurignacian layers of Hohle Fels Cave, in Germany, assemble into a woman a few centimetres tall, her sexual features hugely exaggerated, a ring carved where a head would be, for hanging. She is the oldest known human figurine, made at least 35,000 years ago and perhaps closer to 40,000, millennia before the famous Venuses of the Gravettian.

Why it matters

The first known image of a human being is not a portrait but an emphasis: a body edited to say something, worn on a string. It comes from the same few Swabian caves as the oldest flutes and the ivory lion-man, a workshop district of the imagination at the entrance of Homo sapiens into Europe. What the emphasis meant, fertility, protection, something we lack the categories for, the ivory does not say.

Dating & uncertainty

The discoverer's claim is 'at least 35,000 calendar years'; the figurine lay at the very base of the Aurignacian deposits. Redating of the Swabian Aurignacian with cleaned collagen pushed the start of that culture, with its figurative art and music, toward 42,500 years. The anchor sits between the two bounds that the dating actually supports.

Sources

1. Conard (2009), Nature · A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germanydoi:10.1038/nature07995
2. Higham et al. (2012), Journal of Human Evolution · Testing models for the beginnings of the Aurignacian and the advent of figurative art and music: the radiocarbon chronology of Geissenklösterledoi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.03.003
3. Mellars (2009), Nature · Archaeology: origins of the female imagedoi:10.1038/459176a

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