A bit of a meta comment: I love when wikipedia articles are posted to HN, I always click on them as I know they will be interesting. On one of the recent wikipedia article posts (Glacier Mice I believe) someone commented that there should be a bluesky bot that collects and posts these so I (well Claude..) made one!
> Some researchers have ascribed sexual characteristics to the object.
My wife jokes that anthropologists think everything is about either sex or religion. It never occurs to them that these figurines might be toys for kids. After all, children 40,000 years ago were anatomically modern. They would have gotten bored and wanted to play, or missed their parents while the parents were out foraging or hunting.
If you read the "Manufacture" section you will find this:
> Wulf Hein and Kurt Wehrberger conducted an experimental replication with the kinds of stone tools available at the time. Removing the base of the tusk took ten hours. The body was carved with a steep-fronted scraper; the burins requiring regular resharpening. Several tools were needed to separate the torso from the insides of the arms while shaping the head and shoulders, which involved difficult cutting across the grain of the ivory, often requiring two hands on the tool. The basic shaping is estimated to have taken around 200 hours, and in total the recreation likely took more than 370 hours.[d] Jill Cook, Curator of Palaeolithic collections at the British Museum, suggests that "unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months, someone as skilled as an artist may have been excused from other subsistence tasks to work specially on this piece."[23]
Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this, so I do not think it was simply a children's toy.
> My wife jokes that anthropologists think everything is about either sex or religion. It never occurs to them that these figurines might be toys for kids.
They actually do as anyone who actually reads or go to museums knows.
> ... so why would a community living on the edge of subsistence, whose primary concerns were finding food, keeping that fire going, protecting children from predators, allow someone to spend so much time away from those tasks?
One possibility that occurs to me is the carving was done by the elderly, the injured, or possibility the young, who would not have such duties. A carving by a shaman is another possibility.
I think it doesn’t really need much explaining anyway. Just from their example, 2/3 of those tasks (keeping the fire going and protecting from predators) required just… being awake and reasonably alert. I mean you could spend the time sitting around the fire making arrows (or spears or whatever, not sure what they had in year 40k BC), but maybe they ran out of nice stones to sharpen.
Probably most of us would not want to trade places with a substance hunter/gatherer, but their lives had downtime, right? I would expect their lives to be punctuated by good downtime (got enough food to eat and a good supply of tools, time to relax) as well as bad downtime (wasn’t successful at hunting or gathering, ran out of resources to process).
The idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were running around 16 hours a day with no downtime is a fantasy to begin with. They had more leisure time than early farmers and many Americans[1]
In Hindu religion, lion man is called Lord Narasimha, the 4th avatar of Lord Vishnu. He is often worshiped in Ahobilam, Andhra Pradesh, India. This avatar is after Wild Bohr (Varaha) which wandered the forests before it took the avatar of Lion man and settled in caves.3rd and 4th avatars' common link was both were mammals.Second was Tortoise (Reptile) and first was Fish (Aquatic vertebrates)
Hey, thanks for this recommendation! Just watched it and enjoyed it. Very interesting and unexpectedly spiritual. (This must be the one and only Herzog film I've managned to watch to the end.)
The Eurasian Cave Lion was around there back then and was probably the direct model for the Lion-man sculpture. It was roughly 20% larger than modern African lions. Paleolithic cave paintings (e.g., Chauvet) show the male cave lions lacked the heavy neck manes of modern lions.
The sculpture was relatively safe for 40,000 years. I think we should study it, 3D scan it, replicate it, and put it back in the cave so it can stay safe for a few more Millenia. In a museum it may be bombed, burnt, or stolen, and that would be a shame.
How certain are we really that not the materials but the resulting figurine is authentic?
From Wikipedia on the Lion-man (English):
> It was not until archaeologist Joachim Hahn started an inventory and assembly of more than 200 fragments that a figurine with animal and human features began to emerge.[5]
We have seen countless examples before, from the Brontosaur skull mixup mess to the heavy-handed "restoration" of the Knossos Palace, including an essential made up King-Priest frieze from real fragments by Sir Arthur Evans.
For some reason the Wikipedia pages don't contain this information on Brontosaur or Evans' pages for example...
Been reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", this piece is mentioned as the earliest proof of the Cognitive Revolution that we know of. It displays how humans were able to envisions things that do not exist, crafting fiction from reality. How early man was able to share stories and how religions probably came to be.
Isn't that begging the question? For one, people can wear a lion headdress, making it something that does exist in real life. Secondly, it seems to be carved from a single tusk, which might have forced some choices when it comes to anatomy, rather than being "as conceived".
(The timing is right at least and the lead author is from the Smithsonian)
She probably shouldn't have but she let me hold them in my hands. You could see that they were made by stuffing a skull with grass then putting the clay over the skull - you could see the grass imprints on the inside. I think they were from 9000 BC, Syria region. Pretty much brand new compared to this lion.
I’m currently at the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. Was just thinking of this post ten minutes ago when I saw what the plaque described as a “humanoid-lion hybrid creature” from the Neo-Hittite empire in 9th century BCE. In fact lion-men of various sorts are everywhere in the more ancient parts of the museum. Makes me wonder about potential continuity, as distant as this is.
What always strikes me is that someone, 40,000 years ago, using a pointy stone and some ivory, can make a better looking statuette than I could manage with the best modelling clay and tools available today.
40k years from now, a hominid excavates a computer and materializes a login page in the ether. "We think they used this for ritual sacrifice or to brush their teeth or both."
Lion standing up makes no sense. This is supposed to be a bear. The marks on its arm denote how many people it killed. It's not religious, it's not sexual, it's educational.
A bit of a meta comment: I love when wikipedia articles are posted to HN, I always click on them as I know they will be interesting. On one of the recent wikipedia article posts (Glacier Mice I believe) someone commented that there should be a bluesky bot that collects and posts these so I (well Claude..) made one!
https://bsky.app/profile/hnwiki.bsky.social
Check it out!
This article is the first post, and if there is 48 hours with no posts, then one from the archives is posted.
Related: https://www.orangecrumbs.com (nice weekly summary of top wikipedia posts on HN)
this is my favorite Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
I don't want to spam, but I built this during the pandemic (pre ai). Maybe this is useful to you:
https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
There is also a Mastodon bridge via Mastofeed:
https://mastodon.social/@MostDiscussed
> Some researchers have ascribed sexual characteristics to the object.
My wife jokes that anthropologists think everything is about either sex or religion. It never occurs to them that these figurines might be toys for kids. After all, children 40,000 years ago were anatomically modern. They would have gotten bored and wanted to play, or missed their parents while the parents were out foraging or hunting.
If you read the "Manufacture" section you will find this:
> Wulf Hein and Kurt Wehrberger conducted an experimental replication with the kinds of stone tools available at the time. Removing the base of the tusk took ten hours. The body was carved with a steep-fronted scraper; the burins requiring regular resharpening. Several tools were needed to separate the torso from the insides of the arms while shaping the head and shoulders, which involved difficult cutting across the grain of the ivory, often requiring two hands on the tool. The basic shaping is estimated to have taken around 200 hours, and in total the recreation likely took more than 370 hours.[d] Jill Cook, Curator of Palaeolithic collections at the British Museum, suggests that "unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months, someone as skilled as an artist may have been excused from other subsistence tasks to work specially on this piece."[23]
Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this, so I do not think it was simply a children's toy.
EDIT: Not a year, actually just over 2 months.
Yeah, I get the sense “possibly for ritual use” is how anthropologists say “no idea”.
In this case they were not attributing its purpose or meaning to sex, rather trying to identify the artists intended gender of the lion person.
Well, except for finger flutings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_fluting some of which were made by toddlers being held aloft to reach the ceiling.
It's probably because, unfortunately, anthropologists don't play much.
> My wife jokes that anthropologists think everything is about either sex or religion. It never occurs to them that these figurines might be toys for kids.
They actually do as anyone who actually reads or go to museums knows.
> ... so why would a community living on the edge of subsistence, whose primary concerns were finding food, keeping that fire going, protecting children from predators, allow someone to spend so much time away from those tasks?
One possibility that occurs to me is the carving was done by the elderly, the injured, or possibility the young, who would not have such duties. A carving by a shaman is another possibility.
I think it doesn’t really need much explaining anyway. Just from their example, 2/3 of those tasks (keeping the fire going and protecting from predators) required just… being awake and reasonably alert. I mean you could spend the time sitting around the fire making arrows (or spears or whatever, not sure what they had in year 40k BC), but maybe they ran out of nice stones to sharpen.
Probably most of us would not want to trade places with a substance hunter/gatherer, but their lives had downtime, right? I would expect their lives to be punctuated by good downtime (got enough food to eat and a good supply of tools, time to relax) as well as bad downtime (wasn’t successful at hunting or gathering, ran out of resources to process).
The idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were running around 16 hours a day with no downtime is a fantasy to begin with. They had more leisure time than early farmers and many Americans[1]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0614-6
That question does not require any greater explanation than "there was little else to be done, besides waiting for the storm to subside".
The human-animal hybrid immediately brought shamanism to my mind.
In Hindu religion, lion man is called Lord Narasimha, the 4th avatar of Lord Vishnu. He is often worshiped in Ahobilam, Andhra Pradesh, India. This avatar is after Wild Bohr (Varaha) which wandered the forests before it took the avatar of Lion man and settled in caves.3rd and 4th avatars' common link was both were mammals.Second was Tortoise (Reptile) and first was Fish (Aquatic vertebrates)
Hey look, simha/simba, check out the false cognate.
Wild Niels Bohr sounds pretty dangerous.
[flagged]
Bhai, Sanatana Dharma is ancient, but surely this statue is far older.
This statue is around 35,000 years old.
Hinduism is fairly young by contrast and is only around 4000 years old.
For those interested in very early human history, this 2010 documentary by Werner Herzog:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
It was filmed in 3D as was the hype at the time, but the 2D version is completely watchable and is the most commonly distributed format.
Hey, thanks for this recommendation! Just watched it and enjoyed it. Very interesting and unexpectedly spiritual. (This must be the one and only Herzog film I've managned to watch to the end.)
The Eurasian Cave Lion was around there back then and was probably the direct model for the Lion-man sculpture. It was roughly 20% larger than modern African lions. Paleolithic cave paintings (e.g., Chauvet) show the male cave lions lacked the heavy neck manes of modern lions.
The sculpture was relatively safe for 40,000 years. I think we should study it, 3D scan it, replicate it, and put it back in the cave so it can stay safe for a few more Millenia. In a museum it may be bombed, burnt, or stolen, and that would be a shame.
How certain are we really that not the materials but the resulting figurine is authentic?
From Wikipedia on the Lion-man (English):
> It was not until archaeologist Joachim Hahn started an inventory and assembly of more than 200 fragments that a figurine with animal and human features began to emerge.[5]
We have seen countless examples before, from the Brontosaur skull mixup mess to the heavy-handed "restoration" of the Knossos Palace, including an essential made up King-Priest frieze from real fragments by Sir Arthur Evans.
For some reason the Wikipedia pages don't contain this information on Brontosaur or Evans' pages for example...
Been reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", this piece is mentioned as the earliest proof of the Cognitive Revolution that we know of. It displays how humans were able to envisions things that do not exist, crafting fiction from reality. How early man was able to share stories and how religions probably came to be.
Sapiens is super loose about interpreting facts carefully, particularly the prehistory part.
Isn't that begging the question? For one, people can wear a lion headdress, making it something that does exist in real life. Secondly, it seems to be carved from a single tusk, which might have forced some choices when it comes to anatomy, rather than being "as conceived".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohle_Fels
At Hohle Fels, they also found a similar lion man — 2 meters from a harmonically tuned flute!
Between 35,000 and 41,000 years old. Germany.
I had a project at the Smithsonian's conservation analytical laboratory in the later 90s and made friends with a girl working in the lab that was working on these: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251028779_Three_lat...
(The timing is right at least and the lead author is from the Smithsonian)
She probably shouldn't have but she let me hold them in my hands. You could see that they were made by stuffing a skull with grass then putting the clay over the skull - you could see the grass imprints on the inside. I think they were from 9000 BC, Syria region. Pretty much brand new compared to this lion.
I’m currently at the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. Was just thinking of this post ten minutes ago when I saw what the plaque described as a “humanoid-lion hybrid creature” from the Neo-Hittite empire in 9th century BCE. In fact lion-men of various sorts are everywhere in the more ancient parts of the museum. Makes me wonder about potential continuity, as distant as this is.
What always strikes me is that someone, 40,000 years ago, using a pointy stone and some ivory, can make a better looking statuette than I could manage with the best modelling clay and tools available today.
40k years from now, a hominid excavates a computer and materializes a login page in the ether. "We think they used this for ritual sacrifice or to brush their teeth or both."
Lion standing up makes no sense. This is supposed to be a bear. The marks on its arm denote how many people it killed. It's not religious, it's not sexual, it's educational.
Still more compelling than most modern AI art. The sheer imagination and skill from that era are astounding.
[flagged]
I. Am. Lion. Man.