r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Top_Leadership9575 • 5h ago

Image LION MAN OF HOHLENSTEIN STADEL. A 40,000 year old human lion sculpture carved from mammoth ivory. One of the oldest known works of figurative art.

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546 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

24

u/WaltuhWhiteYo_UhHuH 5h ago

Jar jar binks?

5

u/gryffindorgodric 4h ago

Mesa thinks yusa rightsa

6

u/StatisticianUsual471 4h ago

Even back then they tried to warn us

1

u/sharlyn92 1h ago

mammoth ivory sounds way harder to carve than wood

2

u/PitifulEar3303 3h ago

Post this on r/whatisthisthing and they will say it's a dildo.

Gonna be a tough fit for Mrs cave woman.

3

u/jeffa666 4h ago

Fuck! It is 🤣

1

u/AromaticDrafting 4h ago

i cant unsee it now thanks

1

u/lorebeforelogic 3h ago

The original furry, turns out he was a trendsetter 40,000 years ahead of his time

9

u/ShinAusra 5h ago

Still has better articulation than some hasbro products

9

u/Successful_Theory373 4h ago

Oldest known furry?

4

u/gibsonl6s 3h ago

It was assembled over the course of decades from more than 300 individual parts. It's a fascinating story—there was a report about it on German television.

3

u/wjbc 2h ago

Thanks for this, it is a fascinating story. The original discovery was interrupted by World War II. Decades later the fragments were rediscovered, and in the decades since more and more fragments were found, most very tiny.

2

u/gibsonl6s 1h ago

Professor Nicholas J. Conard, an American who speaks fluent German with a charming accent and works at the University of Tübingen, is currently THE leading authority on these prehistoric excavations in southern Germany, and the way he philosophized about the figure was a lot of fun and very interesting.

2

u/EduardBon 4h ago

Michelangelo’s gran gran gran… gran father.

1

u/notanyimbecile 5h ago

That's quite a tusk

1

u/confused-hustler 2h ago

Peugeot’s logo is based on this!

1

u/_tenneSevy 1h ago

It’s not a bear?

1

u/ch0w0 45m ago

he was a man, he was a lion man

0

u/ronweasleisourking 4h ago

Jar jar binks innit 

0

u/Bivolion13 3h ago

Figurative? Nah. Proof of monsters back then

-1

u/oxydizing_agent 4h ago

Similar to Narsingh, a deity in Sanatan.

•

u/SoundAndSmoke 8m ago

Hohlenstein is a geographical region (a massif) and Stadel is the name of a cave in it.

Also people were arguing if it is a man or a woman and the museum finally decided to call it Löwenmensch (lion human)