WORLD'S OLDEST SCULPTURES AND CARVED ART

EARLY MODERN HUMAN SCULPTURE AND CARVED ART

Dolni Vestonice ceramic Venus

Early modern humans began sculpting monuments and figures from stone, bone, antler and ivory, beginning around 40,000 years ago. Portable art objects like statues may have helped clan leaders impart the oral tradition of their people. One anthropologist called them "illustrations without books."

Ivory was used almost exclusively to create adornments, not weapons or tools. Modern humans developed various techniques for working ivory, including drilling, gouging, carving and polishing it with metallic abrasives such as hematite. Some items have been found hundreds of miles from their sources, which seems to indicate that some form of trade existed.

In 1912, fantastic sculptures of bison were found by three boys exploring the Volp River, where it went underground near Entere in the Pyrenees foothills. Carved sculptures made of bone, ivory, clay and stone between 16,000 and 9,000 years ago at the museum in Le Eyzies France include a bison licking insect bite on its back; a pride of lions complete with whiskers and ear hair carved on an animal rib; rearing horse adorning spear thrower; and rare bear and turtle carving. [Source: Kenneth Weaver, National Geographic, November 1985]

Websites and Resources on Prehistoric Art: Chauvet Cave Paintings archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet ; Cave of Lascaux archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en; Trust for African Rock Art (TARA) africanrockart.org; Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com; Australian and Asian Palaeoanthropology, by Peter Brown peterbrown-palaeoanthropology.net

Websites and Resources on Hominins and Human Origins: Smithsonian Human Origins Program humanorigins.si.edu ; Institute of Human Origins iho.asu.edu ; Becoming Human University of Arizona site becominghuman.org ; Hall of Human Origins American Museum of Natural History amnh.org/exhibitions ; The Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com ; Britannica Human Evolution britannica.com ; Human Evolution handprint.com ; University of California Museum of Anthropology ucmp.berkeley.edu; John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog johnhawks.net/ ; New Scientist: Human Evolution newscientist.com/article-topic/human-evolution

Bone and Antler Carvings

Tom Metcalfe wrote in Live Science: Many of the finest artworks from the Upper Paleolithic period are ancient carvings of bone or antler — relatively soft but durable materials that could be easily shaped with stone tools and easily carried from place to place. Bone and antler carvings from this time included figurative sculptures of people, in the form of Venus figurines; body ornaments such as necklaces; and portrayals of animals, which may have been used as magical charms for hunting.[Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, June 24, 2019]

Animal bones are easier to carve than stone and last longer than wood. Carvings turned up in France, Spain and Germany. One famous carving, made from reindeer antler, was found in a rock shelter in southwest France, and is thought to date from between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago. It shows a bison — a common herd animal at the time, but now extinct in Europe — apparently turning its head to lick an insect bite.

A 12,000-year-old section of a reindeer antler from Montgaudier cave in France contains elaborate engravings of seals, salmon, and snakes with genitalia. The “ Löwenmensch” , or “Lion-human,” is foot-tall sculpture with the head and upper body of a cave lion and the upright stature and legs of a person. Carved from a mammoth tusk, it was found at Hohlenstein-Stadel, a site near Vogelherd, Germany in 1939.

Flint Statuettes

In 2007, the journal Antiquity reported of dozens of small portable statuettes recently unearthed in Germany, France, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The figurines, chipped in flint, or carved in ivory or bone between 14,000 and 16,000 years ago, are of stylised women, or parts of women, with over- sized buttocks, long straight or arched trunks, small or missing breasts, and no heads, arms or feet. At Wilczyce, in Poland, the archeologists have also dug up more than 100 ancient stylised pictures of these women’s long straight backs and large bustles engraved on schist plaques. [Source: Bob Brockie, The Dominion Post April 9, 2007]

Some of these strangely-shaped flint objects were discovered years ago when archaeologists misidentified them as early tools, and called them “strangled blades”. Last year, however, the research team, led by Romuald Schild at the Polish Academy of Sciences, discovered the tools are all in mint condition. They have never been used to scrape, cut, or hammer anything.

Dolni Vestonice

Objects from Dolni Vestonice

Some of earliest known ceramics were found at Dolni Vestonice and Pavlove, hill sites in the Czech Republic that were the home of prehistoric seasonal camps. Thousands of fragments of human figures, as well as the kilns that produced them have been found in sites in Moravia in what is now Russia the Czech Republic. Some have been dated to be 26,000 years old. The figurines were made from moistened loess, a fine sediment, and fired at high temperatures. Predating the first known ceramic vessels by 10,000 years, the figurines, some scientists believe, were produced and exploded on purpose based on the fact that most of the sculptures have been found in pieces.

Dolni Vestonice has been dated to 27,000 B.C. and has been called the world’s oldest village but most scholars argue is too small and too rudimentary to qualify as a village or town. In any case a number of important discoveries related to early man have been found there. Dolni Vestonice is the site of the earliest known potter’s kiln. Carved and molded images of animals, women, strange engravings, personal ornaments, and decorated graves have been found scattered over several acres at the site. In the main hut, where the people ate and slept, two items were found: a goddess figurine made of fired clay and a small and cautiously carved portrait made from mammoth ivory of a woman whose face was drooped on one side. The goddess figurine is the oldest known baked clay figurine. On top of its head are holes which may have held grasses or herbs. The potter scratched two slits that stretched from the eyes to the chest which were thought to be the life-giving tears of the mother goddess. [Source: mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/europe/dolni_vestonice]

Some of the sculpture may represent the first example of portraiture (representation of an actual person). One such figure, carved in mammoth ivory, is roughly three inches high. The subject appears to be a young man with heavy bone structure, thick, long hair reaching past his shoulders, and possibly the traces of a beard. Particle spectrometry analysis dated it to be around 29,000 years old. The remains of a kiln was found on an encampment in a small, dry-hut, whose door faced towards the east. Scattered around the oven were many fragments of fired clay. Remains of clay animals, some stabbed as if hunted, and other pieces of blackened pottery still bear the fingerprints of the potter. [Source: Wikipedia]

World’s Oldest Sculptures

The world's first sculptures were palm-sized carvings made of bone, horn and stone. They were mostly shaped by being chipped away with flint tools. Perhaps older carvings were made of wood but if they did exist they likely rotted and have been lost to time.

Volgenherd bear

According to Archaeology magazine: A tiny, 1.6-inch-long sculpted cave lion found in western Siberia’s Denisova Cave is believed to be one of the world’s oldest carved animal figurines. Made from a woolly mammoth tusk, the partially intact carving was originally painted with red ochre and further decorated with a series of incised lines. Experts believe the figurine dates to between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago, but they do not yet know whether it was made by early Homo sapiens or by an extinct. [Source: Archaeology magazine, March -April 2020]

The world's oldest known sculpture as of the 1980s was animal head carved in wooly rhinoceros vertebrae. Found in Tombaga Siberia, it has been dated to be 34,960 years old. The world's oldest stone figure is a 31,790-year-old serpentine female statuette from Glagneberg Austria. Several 32,000-year-old sophisticated ivory human and animal figures have been found in Hohlenstein-Stadel, Geissenklösterle and Vogelherd caves in southern Germany. [Source: Guinness Book of Records]

A 33,000-year-old horse carving made from mammoth ivory, found in Vogelherd cave, may have been used as pendant or a totem. Features on it were worn down by repeated human handling. Vogelherd has also yielded carvings of a leopard, a lion, a bear, a mammoth and a crude human figure. Some of the carvings have arrow and spear lines engraved into them which some anthropologists believe symbolizes the spirit that "animal" being killed.

Three small 30,000-year-old figurines carved from of mammoth tusk ivory were found in a cave in the Swabian Mountains near Ulm in southwestern Germany. One is a representation of a horse head. Another is of a bird, possibly a duck or a cormorant. The third is half-animal, half man creature. None is larger than an inch. The find was reported in December 2003.

Other famous early figurines include the 26,000-year-old head of a lion from Moravia in the Czech Republic; and a 25,000-year-old Venus of Brassempou, the head of woman with a hairstyle not so different from those seen today The latter is a fragmentary ivory figurine discovered in a cave at Brassempouy, France in 1892. It is one of the earliest known realistic representations of a human face.

Vogelherd Sculpture

Vogelherd sculpture

Chip Walter wrote in National Geographic: Nicholas Conard of Tübingen University “extracts four small pine boxes and sets them gingerly on the table in front of me. Within each sits a tiny carving: a horse, a mammoth, a bison, and a lion. All are from a German cave called Vogelherd. They display a grace and beauty and playfulness that would make any artist today proud. Yet they are 40,000 years old—predating the painted masterpieces of Chauvet by 5,000 years. ““Jaw-dropping,” says Conard, the university’s scientific director of prehistory. “Every piece is different. But when you look at them, it’s obvious they form a coherent whole.” [Source: Chip Walter, National Geographic, January 2015]

“The humans who made these objects were part of a population that left the African homeland some 60,000 years ago, taking a route through the Middle East and what is now Turkey, along the western fringe of the Black Sea, and up the Danube River Valley. As far as we know, nowhere along that journey did they leave signs of an artistic inclination, not even a piece of marked ocher. But once settled some 43,000 years ago in the Lone and Ach River Valleys of southern Germany, they suddenly began to create—not crude etchings but fully realistic animal figurines carved out of mammoth tusk.

“The sources of most of these objects are four caves: Hohle Fels and Geissenklösterle in the Ach Valley, and Hohlenstein-Stadel and Vogelherd in the Lone. Not much more than indentations in the rock face, the caves could easily be missed today by someone driving the backcountry roads that wind through Germany’s southwestern mountains. Lush and green today, the Ach and Lone Valleys 40,000 years ago, at the beginning of a period known as the Aurignacian, were frigid steppe landscapes, dotted with herds of horses, reindeer, and mammoths. In spite of the harsh conditions, the richness of the archaeological sites indicates that population sizes in the Aurignacian were growing. The increases could help explain an apparent flare-up of creativity, not unlike those seen earlier in Africa. Maybe the difficulties these European settlers faced, says Conard, led them to share customs that spread from one group, and generation, to the next. In hard times prized carvings and tools could have smoothed the way toward intertribal marriages, trade, and alliances and helped spread new techniques for hunting, building shelters, and making clothing.

Venus Statues

Venus de Willendorf

The oldest known sculptures of human figures are the Upper Paleolithic "Venuses" found in Russia, the Ukraine, Austria, the Ancient Near East, the Czech Republic, Crete, Western Asia, France and the Aegean. Dated to 27,000 to 20,000 years ago, the figurines were usually made of soapstone, limestone, calcite serpentine and ivory. Some were made from ceramics (See Above).

Venus figurines are one of the characteristic art forms of the Upper Paleolithic period. Most date to between 28,000 and 25,000 years ago. The oldest found so far is the (5-centimeter (2-inch) -long Venus of Hohle Fels, which is made from mammoth ivory. It was found in a cave in the Swabian Alps in southwest Germany, along with a vulture bone flute, and is thought to be at least 35,000 years old. One of the most famous figurines is the Venus of Willendorf, found in Austria in 1908. It dates to between 32,000 and 27,000 years ago. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, June 24, 2019]

Many depict pregnant women with blank faces, huge breasts and exaggerated sexual parts. Some show the women in positions associated with giving birth. Men were rarely depicted as figurines. They were more likely to be seen in a hunting scene painted on a cave walls.

The first Venus figurines were found in the 1880s in caves near Monaco. Not long after a fat, big breasted Venus was found in Austria that was dated to be 25,000 to 22,000 years old. Most Venus figurines have been found in Central Europe and Russia. Many were found in caves and open-air sites with stone and bone weaponry, ivory jewelry, and the remains of Ice Age animals.

In May 2009, a picture and information in a the oldest known Venus statue was released by the University of Tuebingen. Found in a cave in the German town of Hohle Fels, the figure was carved from mammoth ivory and was dated to be about 35,000 years old. Measuring about 10 centimeters tall and five centimeters wide, it has enormous breasts, belly and hips; a vagina; a chubby, chunky body and a tiny head.

Many Venus statues were perforated at the ankles presumably so they could suspended upside down. The Black Venus is nearly 26,000-years-old figure found in the Czech village of Dolní Vestonice in 1924. Splintered and made of clay, it was found on a hill among charred, fractured mammoth bones.

Horse Turns Out to Be a Cave Bear or Lion

Jarrett A. Lobell wrote in Archaeology magazine: Nearly 25 years ago, a team working in Hohle Fels Cave in southern Germany’s Swabia region unearthed a small piece of carved ivory they believed represented a horse’s head. Even as three more small ivory pieces that were part of the same figurine were found subsequently, their judgment didn’t change. A fifth piece of the Ice Age sculpture has recently been discovered, and researchers now believe it depicts an entirely different animal. “As soon as the pieces were fit together, it was clear from the shape of the shoulder and body that they couldn’t belong to a horse,” says archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen. [Source: Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology magazine November/December 2023

The figurine was created about 40,000 years ago, at a time when modern humans coexisted with many large mammals, including cave lions and cave bears, some of which are depicted in other small carved figurines found in the cave. “It’s possible the carving is a lion, but I favor the interpretation of it as a bear,” says Conard. As to what this and the other animal carvings might have meant to their creators, Conard is less certain. “The Paleolithic artists of the Swabian caves were skilled craftspeople and artists, and I think both women and men made ivory carvings,” he says. “In the case of the animal carvings, there is considerable uncertainty about the meaning of the depictions.”

According to Business Insider: The figurine's head was first found in 1999 in the Hohle Fels cave — an important archaeological site of ice age artifacts nestled in Germany's Swabian Jura region Conard. The fifth piece, a body fragment, showed up in 2022. Conrad himself believes that it's a cave bear because the figurine's "pronounced bear hump" matches the height of its shoulders and appears to imitate a bear's gait. However, Conard said that his colleagues have also identified properties of the fragments that are similar to a Eurasian cave lion. "It is by no means always easy to identify Ice Age depictions with certainty, especially when they are preserved in such fragmentary form," Conard said. "It therefore makes sense to look extra carefully for the missing parts of this animal in the years to come." [Source: Hannah Getahun, Business Insider, August 11, 2023]

Lion Man

Chip Walter wrote in National Geographic: “Of all the findings to emerge from this period in Germany, none is more fascinating than the Löwenmensch (Lionman) of Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave, a fantastical sculpture nearly 40,000 years old. The original Löwenmensch fragments—some 200 of them—were discovered in 1939, on the eve of World War II, by Robert Wetzel, a professor of anatomy at Tübingen University, and a geologist named Otto Völzing. Wetzel had hoped to work on the pieces of mammoth tusk when the war ended, but they sat untouched in a box for 30 years. Then, in 1969, archaeologist Joachim Hahn pulled them out and began to piece them together like a three-dimensional puzzle. [Source: Chip Walter, National Geographic, January 2015]

“As he did, an extraordinary work of art emerged. At nearly a foot high, the Löwenmensch dwarfs all other carvings so far discovered in the German valleys. But what makes it particularly interesting, says Claus-Joachim Kind, an archaeologist at the State Office for Cultural Heritage in Baden-Württemberg, is that it depicts for the first time a creature that was completely imaginary, part man and part lion. Its creation required not only an unusually inventive mind, but also impressive technical skills and an enormous amount of time—an estimated 400 hours. “This is not something you do in the evening after work,” says Kind.

“You can feel the power of the figure when you look at it, the seamless melding of a stately human and a ferocious animal. Does the sculpture reflect a wish to bestow a lion’s power on a human? Or could it represent a shaman’s special ability to straddle the spiritual worlds of human and animal? Hohlenstein-Stadel is the only cave in the region where archaeologists have found no everyday tools, bones, or rubbish. It is deeper than the other caves too. It’s not difficult to imagine that within its chambers early hunters venerated the Lionman and that Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave was an early locus of prehistoric religion. This was “a holy place,” says Kind.

“Conard thinks these people possessed minds as fully modern as ours and, like us, sought in ritual and myth answers to life’s mysteries, especially in the face of an uncertain world. Who governs the migration of the herds, grows the trees, shapes the moon, turns on the stars? Why must we die, and where do we go afterward? “They wanted answers,” he says, “but they didn’t have any science-based explanations for the world around them.”

Piecing Together the Lion Man

For more than 70 years, archaeologists have been piecing together the “lion man” out of mammoth ivory fragments unearthed in a southern German cave. Using recently uncovered fragments, archaeologists may be able to finally be able to complete the job. [Source: Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology, Volume 65 Number 2, March/April 2012 ==]

Jarrett A. Lobell wrote in Archaeology magazine: “On August 25, 1939, archaeologists working at a Paleolithic site called Stadelhole (“stable cave”) at Hohlenstein (“hollow rock”) in southern Germany, uncovered hundreds of mammoth ivory fragments. Just one week later, before they could complete their fieldwork and analyze the finds, World War II began. The team was forced to quickly fill the excavation trenches using the same soil in which they found the ivory pieces. For the next three decades, the fragments sat in storage at the nearby City Museum of Ulm, until archaeologist Joachim Hahn began an inventory. As Hahn pieced together more than 200 fragments, an extraordinary artifact dating to the Aurignacian period (more than 30,000 years ago) began to emerge. It was clearly a figure with both human and animal characteristics. However, only a small part of the head and the left ear had been found, so the type of creature it represented remained a mystery. ==

“Between 1972 and 1975, additional fragments from excavation seasons in the 1960s, which had been stored elsewhere, and still others picked up from the cave’s floor, were taken to the museum. Yet it took until 1982 for paleontologist Elizabeth Schmidt to put the new pieces together with Hahn’s earlier reconstruction. Schmidt not only corrected several old errors, but also added parts of the nose and mouth that made it clear that the figurine had a cat’s head. Although the artifact is often called Lowenmensch (the “lion man”), the word mensch is not specifically male in German, and neither the gender of the animal nor of its human parts is discernible. Five years later, to conserve the figurine, the glue that held it together was dissolved. It was then carefully put back together, revealing that only about two thirds of the original had actually been recovered. ==

Vogelherd statue

“This changed in 2008, when archaeologist Claus-Joachim Kind returned to the site at Hohlenstein. Kind removed the old backfill from the hastily concluded excavation of 1939. Over the next three years, Kind’s team found several hundred more small mammoth ivory fragments. “In 2009, when we found the first ones, it was a huge surprise,” says Kind. “But this is exactly the spot where the fragments of the figurine were originally found, so I knew right away that some belonged to the lion man. It had clearly been damaged during the earlier excavations. Only the larger pieces were collected and the smaller ones left behind,” he adds. Kind was able to fit several of the new pieces to form part of the back and neck, and a computer simulation of the lion man was created, showing the placement of several more previously unattached fragments. “At the end of the 2011 season, all the backfill will have been removed. There will be no more pieces left,” says Kind. “We hope that the lion man will finally be complete.” ==

One of the most famous works of Ice Age art has been given a new face. A lion sculpted from mammoth ivory about 40,000 years ago was found in the 1930s in Vogelherd Cave, one of the four caves in Germany’s Swabian Jura Mountains that has produced evidence of the world’s earliest art and music. The lion has long been thought to be a relief, unique in Paleolithic art, says archaeologist Nick Conard of the University of Tübingen. For the last decade, Conard has been reexamining both the cave and spoil heaps left by earlier archaeological efforts. Among that material, his team found a carved lion’s face they soon realized was the missing half of the famous figurine’s head. It’s now clear that the lion was not a relief but rather, like the caves’ other Ice Age figurines, a fully three-dimensional work. [Source: Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology magazine, November-December 2014]

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024