Lion Man
A figure carved from mammoth ivory about 40,000 years ago, with the head of a cave lion on an upright body with human legs. About 30 centimetres tall, it was found in pieces in Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in southern Germany in 1939 and is in the Museum Ulm. It is one of the oldest known figures of a creature that does not exist.
Meaning
The Lion Man, in German the Löwenmensch, is the largest sculpture of Ice Age art and the oldest image of a mythical creature, in Museum Ulm’s words. The lion is in the head, the long body and the arms, which are a big cat’s forelegs and paws; the legs, feet and upright stance are human. It was carved from the right tusk of a young mammoth or a full-grown female, using the tusk’s whole width; 28 growth rings can be counted near the base. The carver used the hollow at the tusk’s root to open the space between the legs, and the tusk’s length and girth fixed the stiff pose with arms close to the body. The left side is more carefully worked than the right and is the only side decorated: fine incisions on the left ear, a row of horizontal notches on the left upper arm cut so that the ridges between stand out in low relief, and a few fine lines on the sole of the left foot. Museum Ulm dates it to about 40,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian, the culture of the first modern humans in Europe; a city of Ulm text of 2008 still gave about 32,000 years, an earlier estimate. No living tradition claims it. Hohlenstein-Stadel is one of six caves of the Swabian Jura that became a World Heritage site in 2017 for their carved figurines, musical instruments and ornaments.
Origin and history
The Lion Man was found on the last day of a dig. On 25 August 1939 the geologist Otto Völzing, excavating at Hohlenstein-Stadel in the Lone valley near Ulm for Robert Wetzel, uncovered some 200 fragments of worked mammoth ivory about 27 metres inside the cave and a metre down. Two days later the outbreak of the Second World War ended the season, and the pieces were packed off and stored, later passing to the Ulm Museum with Wetzel’s collection. About thirty years on the Tübingen prehistorian Joachim Hahn fitted them together into a long, human-like figure with a high round ear, but the face was missing, and no one could say whether the animal was a bear or a big cat.
More pieces turned up over the following years. When the torso was shown at a conference in 1972, a former member of the dig remembered fragments Wetzel had kept in his study in Tübingen; they proved to be part of the back of the head and the right arm. Later a mother brought the museum some pieces her young son had picked up on a walk at the cave. One of them gave the figure its face, and by 1982 it was clear: the face of a cave lion. The first professional restoration followed at the end of the 1980s in the Württemberg State Museum.
In 2009 the Baden-Württemberg heritage office reopened the cave under Claus-Joachim Kind and found the spot where the figure had lain in 1939, with many more fragments. In 2012 and 2013 a team led by the conservator Nicole Ebinger-Rist took the figure apart and rebuilt it with the new pieces. It is now put together from more than 300 fragments and almost complete.
Man or woman?
For some years the Lion Man was a lion woman. When the fragments were reassembled more compactly in 1987 and 1988, a triangular piece between the legs that had looked male moved higher, and because a horizontal notch across the belly closes it, as in female nudes of the period, the palaeontologist Elisabeth Schmid read it as female. The missing mane seemed to agree, and the figure was described as a statuette of a woman with a lioness’s head. Because the original surface has flaked off the whole front, Museum Ulm chose the neutral name Löwenmensch, “lion person”, in 1994. The same year the paintings of Chauvet were found, with some 40 cave lions, among them maneless males, which undid the mane argument. The 2012–13 restoration settled it for the museum: a small, freely hanging plate worked all round in the crotch can be read as stylised male genitals, and the museum now describes the figure as male.
Other lion people of the Swabian Jura
The Lion Man is not alone. A figure only 2.5 centimetres high, its legs missing, found in 2002 in the Ach valley about 35 kilometres away, has the eyes, muzzle and round ear of the same creature. The “Adorant” from Geißenklösterle, found in 1979, is an upright figure with raised arms carved in relief on an ivory plate 3.8 centimetres long; its face has flaked away, and specialists do not rule out that it too was a lion. The 2008 city of Ulm text read these as signs that the hunters of both valleys shared one language and one view of the world. A small lion head from Vogelherd cave looks strikingly like the Lion Man’s in profile, Museum Ulm notes.
What was it?
No one knows. The questions put most often, in the words of the city of Ulm’s 2008 text, are whether it shows a shaman wearing a lion skin or a god honoured with small idols. The six parallel notches on the left arm, that text suggests, may show scars or tattoos, and were probably more than decoration. France’s Ministry of Culture places the figure among the Aurignacian part-human, part-animal works in which, it says, myth was given shape. Museum Ulm’s own conclusion is that the figure points to the spiritual world of Ice Age people, but that “we will never be able to decipher” their world view.
Read next
- Next in Cave and rock artPetroglyphsImages pecked, carved or scratched into rock. Pictographs, by contrast, are painted onto it. In the American Southwest most petroglyphs were made by the ancestors of today’s Pueblo peoples and other tribes, who regard them as part of their living heritage; at Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico there are more than 20,000.
- The same shape in Symbols across culturesGoddesses of warGoddesses of war include Athena in Greece, Inanna (Ishtar) in Mesopotamia, the lioness Sekhmet in Egypt, Durga in Hindu tradition and the Morrígan in Irish myth. Each fought in her own way: Athena with strategy, Sekhmet with the sun’s fire, Durga against a demon no god could kill.
See also
Chauvet Cave, Venus of Willendorf, Lascaux cave paintings, Altamira Cave, Cueva de las Manos (hand stencils), Cave art signs.
Sources
- Archaeology collection: the Lion Man (Museum Ulm), Museum Ulm, “Archaeology” (collections), Museum Ulm, collection page
- The Lion Man (Museum Ulm, loewenmensch.de), Museum Ulm, loewenmensch.de, “The Lion Man” (English page), Museum Ulm, page text
- Die Entdeckung des Löwenmenschen (Museum Ulm, loewenmensch.de), Museum Ulm, loewenmensch.de, “Die Entdeckung des Löwenmenschen”, Museum Ulm, page text
- Die Figur – von Kopf bis Fuß (Museum Ulm, loewenmensch.de), Museum Ulm, loewenmensch.de, “Die Figur – von Kopf bis Fuß”, Museum Ulm, page text
- Der Löwenmensch (Stadt Ulm with the Ulmer Museum, 2008), Wolf-Henning Petershagen, Der Löwenmensch, press text published by the City of Ulm in cooperation with the Ulmer Museum, May 2008, Stadt Ulm, pp. 1–3
- Neuer alter Löwenmensch (Archäologie Online), Archäologie Online, “Neuer alter Löwenmensch”, report on the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Baden-Württemberg restoration project, Archäologie Online, news report
- Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura (UNESCO), UNESCO World Heritage List, property 1527, “Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura”, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Brief synthesis
- Symbolic expressions (Chauvet, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Chauvet cave: “Symbolic expressions”, Ministère de la Culture (France), The Aurignacians › Symbolic expressions
- Die Bedeutung des Löwenmenschen und der eiszeitlichen Kunst (Museum Ulm), Museum Ulm, loewenmensch.de, “Bedeutung und Deutung des Löwenmenschen und der Eiszeitkunst von der Schwäbischen Alb”, Museum Ulm, page text
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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