Ice Age Lion Man is world’s earliest figurative sculpture

Work carved from mammoth ivory has been redated and 1,000 new fragments discovered—but it won’t make it to British Museum show

40,000 years old: Lion Man sculpture. Photo: Thomas Stephan, © Ulmer Museum

The star exhibit initially promised for the British Museum’s “Ice Age Art” show will not be coming—but for a good reason. New pieces of Ulm’s Lion Man sculpture have been discovered and it has been found to be much older than originally thought, at around 40,000 years. This makes it the world’s earliest figurative sculpture. At the London exhibition, which opens on 7 February, a replica from the Ulm Museum will instead go on display.

The story of the discovery of the Lion Man goes back to August 1939, when...

... The latest news is that almost 1,000 further fragments of the statue have been found, following recent excavations in the Stadel Cave by Claus-Joachim Kind. Most of these are minute, but a few are several centimetres long. Some of the larger pieces are now being reintegrated into the figure. [...] theartnewspaper.com

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