“The cave site of Hohle Fels was occupied during the Aurignacian period of prehistory (43,000 to 28,000 years before present), when early humans – thrived in Europe following the disappearance of the Neanderthals. These groups created an explosion of art, some of which had never been seen before in human history, including so-called Venus figurines, musical instruments, elaborate jewelry and cave paintings. Much of this art involved drawing and carving animals that the Aurignacian people would have seen on a day-to-day basis.” (Killgrove 2025)
Sculptures recovered from Hohle Fels include a small bird assumed to represent a water bird, animal figurines, a therianthrope known as the Lion Man, a flute (made from a vulture’s femur) and the famous Hohle Fels Venus. “The Hohle Fels bird is not the oldest figurative sculpture in Europe. That title has been taken by another discovery from the same cave in 2008: the Venus of Hohle Fels, a sculpture of a woman with exaggerated breasts and thighs, which was created 41,000 years ago.” (Killgrove 2025) On 18 July 2026 I published an article on RockArtBlog with the title “CLAVIFORM, VENUS OR STEATOPYGIA?” which questioned the enlarged buttocks seen on Paleolithic Venus figures and in some rock art, suggesting that it might represent the phenomenon of steatopygia.
Does this collection of work represent the beginning of figurative sculpture in Western civilization? Ewen Calloway suggest just that. “The entire collection of ivory carvings at Hohle Fels suggests that something very new was happening around 40,000 years ago in the south German mountains, as the people who created the Aurignacian culture invented types of figurative art and music akin to what we have today.” (Killgrove 2025)
These carvings strike the modern eye as extremely interesting, as if we have not changed that much in the period between their creation in the Aurignacian and now. “There’s something magical about these pieces,’ says Nicholas Conard, an archeologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, who has led the excavation of Hohle Fels since the late 1990s. Conard argues that the artistic capabilities on display at Hohle Fels and nearby caves mark a shift in cognitive and cultural sophistication that might have helped these humans to flourish in ice-age Europe, when other groups vanished. He now hopes to test this theory by collecting ancient DNA from the Hohle Fels cave sediments.” (Callaway 2026) This would, at least, allow him to determine whether the carvings were made by modern humans, or our predecessors in Eutope.
Now, new discoveries at Hohle Fels have made the news. During the 2025 field season, Alexander Janas, an archeologist at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment in Tubinge, Germany, discovered two more miniature bird carvings thought to resemble ptarmigans. “This week, Janas and his colleagues announced their latest treasures: a pair of tiny bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory, and vulture bone flute fragments, discovered during the 2025 field season. The artifacts were unveiled at the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art in Blaubeuren, Germany, on 29 July.” (Callaway 2026) These two new birds are indeed tiny, measuring 2 – 3 cm. each.
And, as I said above, we immediately find these birds charming. They are cute. What else might be waiting to be discovered?
NOTE: Some images in this column were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below. Additionally, some of the quotations I have included have had citations removed from their text. These can also be acquired from the original texts.
REFERENCES:
Callaway, Ewen, 2026, 40,000-year-old birk carvings provide clues to how ice age humans flourished, 29 July 2026, Nature 655 (online), 1120-1122. Accessed online 29 July 2026.
Killgrove, Kristina, 2025, Hohle Fels water bird: The oldest depiction of a bird in the world,
31 March 2025, LiveScience (online), https://www.livescience.com.
Accessed online 29 July 2026.
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