Tübingen, 04. August 2000

Tübingen Archaeologists discover a mammoth ivory statue
dating to 30,000 years ago

pictures

Researchers in the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen, Germany have recovered a representation of a horse carved from mammoth ivory and dating to 30,000 years ago. Excavators found the artwork at the site of Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura, 15km west of the city of Ulm. The specimen is 3.6 cm long and depicts the head of a horse. The finds is part of a much larger representation. This is the sixteenth Ice Age ivory statue of this kind recovered from the region. Together with the finds from Vogelherd Cave excavated in 1931, Hohenstein-Stadel excavated in 1939, and statues from Geissenkl¶sterle found in the 1970s and 1980s, the new find counts among the oldest artworks known. These finds date to a period when the earliest modern Homo sapiens arrived in Europe, and reflect a phase of early prehistory when Neanderthals still occupied broad regions of Europe.

The site of Hohle Fels stands 534 meters above see level in the Ach River Valley, a tributary of the Danube. The excavations at Hohle Fels are currently directed by Nicholas Conard and Hans-Peter Uerpmann and have been ongoing since 1977. Hohle Fels Cave has yielded tens of thousands of finds dating to the Magdelanian ca. 13,000 years ago, and the Gravettian ca. 29,000 years ago. These finds include diverse stone tools, ornaments, remains of fireplaces, and the remains of game animals including reindeer, horse, mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. The newly discovered horse carving underlies the main Gravettian horizons and presumable dates to the still earlier Aurignacian period during which modern humans first arrived in Europe carrying art, musical instruments and other hallmarks of modern cultural behavior. Such forms of expression are not known from sites occupied by Neanderthals. Current evidence indicates that the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany was one of the central regions of cultural innovations after the arrival of modern humans in Europe some 40,000 years ago.

The research at Hohle Fels is conducted by the University of Tübingen and is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Heidelberger Zement company, the village of Schelklingen, the Office of State Archaeology in Baden-Württemberg and the Gesellschaft fªr Urgeschichte.

nicholas.conard@uni-tuebingen.de

Some pictures are presented at http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/qvo/pm/pm342-01.html

EBERHARD KARLS UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN

Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit · Michael Seifert

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( (07071) 29 - 7 67 89 - Fax: (07071) 29 - 5566

Michael.Seifert@uni-tuebingen.de

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