Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

This impulse goes back an astonishingly long way.

One of the most extraordinary surviving examples is the lion man.

carved from mammoth ivory around 40,000 years ago and found in the Holenstein Stado cave in what is now Germany.

It is about 31 centimeters tall and combines a human-like body with the head of a cave lion.

They are not necessarily attempts to record exactly what somebody looked like.

Sometimes they represent things that do not exist at all, or perhaps things people believed existed.

We do not know what the lion man meant to the people who made and saw it.

Religious being? Mythical creature? Story character? Something else entirely.

And in the human case, we use our working memory or mental workspace to do things.

So, for example, there is an incredibly old, it's about 30,000 to 40,000 years old, carving of, I think it's an elephant tusk, I'm not quite sure, called the Löwenmensch, L-O-E-V-E-N-M-E-N-S-C-H.

You can Google it.

It is a carving found near Ulm, Germany, in a cave that has the head of a lion and the body of a man.

[upbeat music] Still to come in this podcast.

We've got, um, one of the oldest figures in the world, about 40,000 years old, made out of mammoth cast, the Lion Man, and we've put it next to this little Star Wars figurine.

London's world-famous Natural History Museum reopens a gallery that's been sealed off to the public for 80 years.

We'll tell you what's there now.

[laughs]

So this gallery is trying to put interesting things together.

So we've got, um, one of the oldest figures in the world, about 40,000 years old, made out of mammoth tusk, the Lion Man.

And we've put it next to this little Star Wars figurine, which has been brought up from the bottom of the sea and colonized by bryozoans.