Prehistoric Sculpture: What the First Figurines Tell Us

A lion-headed man, 40,000 years ago

In 1939, in a cave called Hohlenstein-Stadel in south-west Germany, excavators found more than 200 fragments of mammoth ivory. Put back together over the following decades, they became a standing figure 31.1 cm tall with a human body and the head of a cave lion. The Lion Man was carved somewhere between 41,000 and 35,000 years ago.

It wasn’t alone. The caves of the Swabian Jura, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2017, have produced ivory mammoths, bison, birds, a tiny horse from Vogelherd cave with an arched neck and a finely hatched mane, and the Venus of Hohle Fels, only 6 cm tall and the oldest known figure of a human body. Instead of a head it has a small loop, so it was probably worn on a cord.

A hybrid like the Lion Man suggests stories in which people and animals could cross into each other’s shape, through a performance, a vision or a myth. The figure can’t tell us which. Many carved animals from these caves share the poses of the animals painted on cave walls: a turned head, bunched shoulders, a lifted hoof.

Why so many women?

The figures nicknamed “Venus” are small carvings of women, usually with large breasts, belly and hips, made across Europe from the Pyrenees to Russia. The name goes back to the 1860s, when one of the first found in France was dubbed the “immodest Venus”. It stuck, and it suggests a goddess that nobody can prove. Some figures are slender, some almost abstract, many have no face, and several still carry traces of red ochre.

Fertility idols? Perhaps. Others have read them as self-portraits by women carving their own bodies as they saw them, looking down; as teaching objects about pregnancy; as lucky charms; as badges of identity. Each idea predicts something different, which makes the object the best witness: a pendant should have a worn hole, a figure kept upright a worn base.

The clay figures that exploded

At Dolní Věstonice, in Moravia, people shaped women and animals from loess, a fine wind-blown silt, mixed with water, and fired them more than 25,000 years ago, long before anyone made a clay pot. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice, 11.1 cm tall, survived whole. Most of the others didn’t: the site has produced thousands of fragments.

In 1989 Pamela Vandiver and her colleagues looked closely at the breaks and found the signature of thermal shock, the cracking you get when something wet meets a hot fire. Their suggestion is that many figures went into the fire still damp, on purpose, so that they burst. If they’re right, the bang may have mattered more than the finished object. It is still a hypothesis, though Vandiver’s team argued that the fractures fit it better than accidental breakage.

What the material and the wear tell you

Prehistoric carvers worked in stone, bone, ivory, antler and clay, and each material pushed them in its own direction. Soft stone allows smooth, rounded volumes. Mammoth ivory takes fine detail, but it is dentine laid down in thin layers year after year, so as it dries it splits along them, like the layers of an onion. Antler is tough and springy, and wood, which must have been common, has almost entirely rotted away. The tools were flint: a burin, that is, a flake with a narrow chisel edge, for grooves; scrapers to thin a surface; sand to smooth it; a twisting point for holes.

Then came handling, which leaves its own marks. Bellies, hips and muzzles polish first; the rim of a hole wears smooth where a cord rubbed; ochre survives in creases where fingers couldn’t reach. Some carvings repeat the same rows of dots and lines found on cave walls. And some travelled far: the stone of the Venus of Willendorf matches oolite from the Lake Garda area of northern Italy, hundreds of kilometres from the Danube where it was found.

Where to see them

The great ivory figures of the Swabian Jura are split between Blaubeuren, Ulm and Tübingen, all in the same corner of south-west Germany. The Venus of Willendorf is in Vienna’s Natural History Museum, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice in the Moravian Museum in Brno, the Venus of Lespugue in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and the Swimming Reindeer in the British Museum. Fragile originals are sometimes swapped for replicas or lent abroad, so check before a special trip.

Sources

• Museum Ulm, “The Lion Man” (loewenmensch.de).
• University of Tübingen, press releases on the Venus of Hohle Fels (2009) and the Vogelherd figurines; UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura” (2017).
• P. B. Vandiver et al., “The origins of ceramic technology at Dolní Věstonice, Czechoslovakia”, Science 246 (1989).
• Natural History Museum Vienna, “Venus of Willendorf”; G. W. Weber et al., “The microstructure and the origin of the Venus from Willendorf”, Scientific Reports 12 (2022).
• L. McDermott, “Self-representation in Upper Paleolithic female figurines”, Current Anthropology 37 (1996).
• British Museum, “The Swimming Reindeer” (Palart.550); Musée de l’Homme, “Vénus de Lespugue”; Moravian Museum, Brno, “Venus of Dolní Věstonice”.