40,000-Year-Old Ice Age Figurines: The Vogelherd Animals | Ancient Architects

In the Swabian Jura Mountains of Southern Germany, there are four ancient cave sites that tell us so much about the Aurignacian culture, a people who lived in Ice Age Europe, between 43,000 and 26,000 years ago.

The caves include Hohlenstein-Stadel, where the lion man statue was discovered, Hohle Fels, where the world’s oldest Venus statuette was found, Geißenklösterle and another called Vogelherd.

Vogelherd is the subject of this video because excavations uncovered a truly incredible array of animal figurines and there really isn’t another archaeological site in the world quite like it.

The vast majority of Aurignacian animal figurines come from the this specific location, a limestone karsk cave first excavated in the 1930s, a cave with a long history of occupation. Between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, the cave saw frequent occupation, with Aurignacian and Magdelenian deposits.

From the Aurignacian period we find hundreds of stone tools, scapers missile tips and more. There are a variety of stone, bone and ivory artefacts. There is evidence of fireplaces and several phases of occupation, on a large scale.


Of all the archaeological finds, it’s the collection known as the Vogelherd figurines that make this site so internationally famous and important. They are some of the world’s oldest-known works of figurative art, artefacts made from the ivory of woolly mammoths and these are finely carved with exquisite detail.

Watch this video to learn more about these incedible relics from Ice Age Europe, 40,000-year-old figurines that rival anything found thousands of years later in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

All images are taken from Google Images and the below sources for educational purposes only. Please subscribe to Ancient Architects, Like the video and please leave a comment below.

Sources:
https://donsmaps.com/vogelherd.html
https://journals.openedition.org/pale...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelhe...
https://journals.openedition.org/pale...
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

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