Six caves in the Swabian Jura (Schwäbische Alb) of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, contain the oldest known figurative art in the world: ivory carvings of animals and humans dating to between 40,000 and 43,000 years ago. UNESCO inscribed the Caves and Ice Age Art of the Swabian Jura on the World Heritage List in 2017, recognising that these objects — made by anatomically modern humans using stone tools within a few thousand years of their arrival in Europe — represent the earliest documented capacity for symbolic thought and artistic creation in the human archaeological record.
Six Caves, One Threshold: The Birth of Figurative Art Swabian Jura, Baden-Württemberg
The Swabian Jura is a limestone plateau running across Baden-Württemberg from southwest to northeast, dissected by river valleys that cut deeply through the rock. In the valley walls of the Ach and Lone rivers, erosion and dissolution have carved cave systems that sheltered humans during the last Ice Age. Of the dozens of caves in the region, six stand out as exceptional: Vogelherd, Hohlenstein-Stadel, Hohle Fels, Geißenklösterle, Bockstein, and Schelklingen. All six produced ivory carvings belonging to the Aurignacian culture — the first anatomically modern humans in Europe — dated by radiocarbon and uranium-thorium methods to approximately 40,000–43,000 years before the present.
The Aurignacian period takes its name from the French site of Aurignac, but the Swabian Jura examples are among the oldest found anywhere, predating the famous Lascaux cave paintings in France by roughly 17,000 years. What makes the Swabian objects qualitatively different from earlier evidence of human symbolic behaviour — ochre use, shell beads — is that they are figurative: they depict specific animals and human beings in recognisable form. Someone carved these objects with the intention of representing something visible in the world outside the cave in a permanent medium. The gap between that act and the previous tens of thousands of years of human prehistory, during which no such objects appear in the archaeological record, is what makes the Swabian Jura so significant to understanding human cognitive evolution.
The raw material was mammoth ivory, obtained from tusks by splitting them longitudinally and then carving with stone burins and scrapers. Experimental archaeology has shown that producing a figurine like the Lion Man — 31 centimetres long, with complex three-dimensional form — would have required approximately 400 hours of skilled work. This is not casual tool-making. It implies planning, sustained intention, technical skill passed between individuals, and some form of social or ritual significance that justified the investment of time. What exactly that significance was — religious, shamanic, social identity, narrative — cannot be known from the objects alone, but the investment they represent is unambiguous.
The five caves of the Ach valley (Vogelherd, Hohle Fels, Geißenklösterle, Bockstein, Schelklingen) and the Lonetal valley cave of Hohlenstein-Stadel together constitute a single cultural landscape. Researchers believe the human groups using these shelters were part of a wider Aurignacian network across southwestern Germany and France, exchanging objects, raw materials, and ideas across distances of hundreds of kilometres. Baltic amber found in Aurignacian layers in the Swabian Jura shows that objects — or the people carrying them — moved from the Baltic coast to Baden-Württemberg, over 700 kilometres, during this period.
The Lion Man, the Venus, and the Animals: What the Caves Produced Ulmer Museum, Ulm — 90 km northwest of the cave sites
The Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Lone valley produced the most famous of all the Swabian Jura objects: the Löwenmensch, or Lion Man. A German archaeologist named Robert Wetzel excavated the cave in 1939 and found hundreds of ivory fragments in a sealed chamber near the back of the cave. The excavation was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, the fragments were stored in boxes in a museum in Tübingen, and it was not until 1969 that museum preparator Joachim Hahn assembled enough pieces to reveal what the object was: a 31-centimetre figurine of a human body with the head of a cave lion (Panthera leo spelaea). Further fragments found in later excavations, and re-examination of the 1939 material, allowed a more complete reconstruction. The object is now considered the oldest known figurative depiction of a non-human creature, and the combination of human and animal characteristics has led most researchers to interpret it as evidence of shamanistic belief — the ability to imagine transformation between human and animal states that is a feature of shamanistic cultures across the world.
The Venus of Hohle Fels, found in 2008, represents the other pole of Aurignacian imagery: a 6-centimetre ivory figurine of a female human being with pronounced sexual characteristics — large breasts, wide hips, prominent vulva — and no face, the head replaced by a carved ring suggesting the object was worn as a pendant. It is the oldest known depiction of a human being, dated to approximately 35,000–40,000 years ago. Its sexual emphasis has generated debate about meaning: was it a fertility symbol, a representation of a deity, a personal ornament, something else entirely? No consensus has been reached. What is not in dispute is that the Hohle Fels figurine pushes the date of human self-representation back significantly further than had previously been established.
Vogelherd cave, excavated in 1931, yielded five ivory animal figurines: a mammoth, a horse, a feline, a bear or cave lion, and an aquatic bird. These remain among the most technically accomplished of all Aurignacian carvings — the mammoth in particular, with its characteristic hunched shoulder and tapering trunk, captures the animal in a way that suggests direct, attentive observation. Geißenklösterle produced a bird figurine and fragments of other objects, as well as one of the oldest known bone flutes, suggesting that the Aurignacian inhabitants of the Swabian Jura were producing both visual and musical art within the same cultural moment. All the most significant original objects from the six caves are held in the Ulmer Museum in Ulm, where they are displayed in a dedicated gallery. The cave sites themselves are accessible, but the objects are in Ulm.
Practical information
The six cave sites are spread across the Swabian Jura in two main clusters: the Ach valley caves (Hohle Fels, Vogelherd, Geißenklösterle, Bockstein, Schelklingen) accessible from the town of Schelklingen, and the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Lone valley near Asselfingen. The nearest major city is Ulm, approximately 20 km northwest of the Ach valley sites and 45 km from the Lone valley. By car, the B492 road runs through the Ach valley; the Lone valley is reached via country roads from Ulm or Heidenheim. Public transport connections to the caves themselves are limited — a car or organised tour is the most practical option. Hohle Fels is open for guided tours from March to October; Hohlenstein-Stadel is accessible on foot via a marked trail from the Lonetal valley floor. The Ulmer Museum in Ulm is the essential complement to any visit to the cave sites: it holds the Lion Man, the Venus of Hohle Fels, and the Vogelherd animal figurines in a permanent gallery, and is open Tuesday through Sunday year-round. The museum in Blaubeuren (Urgeschichtliches Museum, approximately 15 km from Schelklingen) also holds significant material from the Aurignacian layers and contextualises the finds within the wider Ice Age landscape of the region.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are the Swabian Jura caves considered the oldest figurative art in the world rather than Chauvet or Lascaux?
The distinction turns on what “figurative art” means and how the objects are dated. The Chauvet Cave in France, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2014, contains cave paintings that are also very ancient — radiocarbon dates have placed some of them at 36,000 years or older, and more recent uranium-series dating of flowstone overlying some images has pushed dates to around 37,000 years before the present. Lascaux, the most famous of the French painted caves, dates to approximately 17,000 years ago and is significantly younger. The Swabian Jura ivory carvings have been dated by radiocarbon and uranium-thorium methods to 40,000–43,000 years before the present, making them older than any other currently known figurative objects or images. The debate in the scientific literature concerns the precision of dating methods and whether any older examples remain to be found — the archaeological record is necessarily incomplete. What is currently established is that the Lion Man from Hohlenstein-Stadel and the animal figurines from Vogelherd are, on the available evidence, the oldest known figurative artworks. The Swabian Jura and the French painted caves together bracket the earliest known period of symbolic image-making in human history, probably representing a single cultural phenomenon distributed across a wide region of Ice Age Europe.
Where are the original Lion Man and Venus of Hohle Fels figurines held, and can visitors see them?
Both original figurines are held at the Ulmer Museum (Museum Ulm) in Ulm, Baden-Württemberg, and are on permanent display. The museum is located in the historic centre of Ulm, a short walk from the Ulm Minster — the tallest church in the world by spire height. The Lion Man is displayed in a dedicated section of the museum’s prehistoric collections alongside other Aurignacian objects from the Swabian Jura sites, including the Vogelherd animal figurines. The Venus of Hohle Fels is also there, as is a replica of the bone flute from Geißenklösterle. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday and closes on Mondays. Admission fees apply. High-quality replicas of the Lion Man are displayed at Hohlenstein-Stadel cave itself and at the Urgeschichtliches Museum in Blaubeuren, which provides a more extensive contextual treatment of Ice Age life in the Swabian Jura. For visitors who want to see both the cave environments and the objects, the practical sequence is: visit Hohle Fels or Hohlenstein-Stadel during a half-day trip into the Jura, then dedicate a separate visit to the Ulmer Museum where the actual figurines can be examined up close. The museum’s prehistoric gallery is one of the best presentations of Aurignacian material culture in any European museum.
What do researchers think the Lion Man was used for, and why does its meaning matter?
The Lion Man — a human body with a cave lion’s head, carved from mammoth ivory approximately 40,000 years ago — has generated extensive interpretive discussion because it is the earliest known depiction of a being that does not exist in nature. A purely representational art would produce images of animals the artists observed (horses, mammoths, bison) or humans. The Lion Man is neither: it is a hybrid, a deliberate combination of two distinct categories of being. This has led most researchers to connect it to shamanic or animistic belief systems in which the boundary between human and animal is permeable — where rituals or altered states of consciousness allow transformation or communication across species lines. This framework is supported by ethnographic evidence from shamanistic cultures worldwide, many of which feature hybrid human-animal beings as central figures in ritual and cosmology. It is also supported by the context of the find: the Lion Man was discovered deep in a chamber at the back of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave, in a location that would have required deliberate effort to reach by firelight. It was not in a domestic area or a casual discard location. Whether this was a ritual deposit, a hidden sacred object, or something else cannot be confirmed, but the location is consistent with intentional placement. The reason this matters beyond archaeology is that the capacity to conceive of a being that does not exist — to imagine outside the directly perceived — is a cognitive prerequisite for religion, narrative, and speculative thought of all kinds.
