The meaning of the carvings is unclear.© H. Jensen, University of Tübingen.A set of ivory figurines found in southwestern Germany add to a growing cache of the oldest art known.
The 30,000-year-old carvings underline the remarkable creativity of our earliest European ancestors. Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen, Germany, discovered the 2-centimetre-high figures in the Hohle Fels Cave in the country's Swabia region1.
The figurines, and similar relics previously unearthed in Swabia, are the earliest known representations of living forms. "Without question, they are the oldest corpus of figurative art in the world," says archaeologist Anthony Sinclair of the University of Liverpool, UK.
The carvings were almost certainly made by Europe's earliest modern settlers. Their location supports the idea that modern humans migrated into Europe along the River Danube more than 30,000 years ago.
But the complexity of the findings undermines the traditional view that art began crudely and gradually acquired sophistication. "The new evidence refuses to fit," says Sinclair. "It seems that the first modern humans in Europe were astonishingly precocious in their skills."
We may need to abandon simple ideas about where and when cultural modernity arose, says Conard. Different populations in Europe and elsewhere may have developed their styles independently.
Animal magic?
The meaning of the carvings is unclear. The Hohle Fels figures represent a horse head, a water bird and a creature than is seemingly half-man, half-cat. "They certainly don't reflect what people were eating at the time," says Conard.
One interpretation is that the carvings demonstrate respect for the natural world. They may depict creatures that impressed early humans with their power or skill, or with which people felt they shared common characteristics, such as aggression.
Conard believes that they are evidence of early shamanism. This controversial idea, first suggested by the South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, holds that people believed in the human spirit transforming into animal forms.
Early cultures may have viewed diving water birds as having the ability to move between the real and spirit worlds, Conard adds. The water-bird carving at Hohle Fels is "the icing on the cake" for those who support Lewis-Williams' theory, he says.
Modern art
Whatever the work meant, experts agree that its makers were unequivocally modern humans. "If you went back in time to join them, you'd have to learn a new language, and possibly how to carve a flint or two, but they would be essentially the same as you," says Conard.
“The first modern humans in Europe were astonishingly precocious”
Anthony Sinclair
University of Liverpool
Carved figures are a more reliable indicator of cultural modernity than blades or pigments, both of which were used by earlier humans such as Neanderthals. Sculptures could only have been produced by a culture capable of symbolic communication - suggesting that they also used complex language.
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