Lion-man
76 points - last Saturday at 11:17 PM
Source> Some researchers have ascribed sexual characteristics to the object.
My wife jokes that anthropologists think everything is about either sex or religion. It never occurs to them that these figurines might be toys for kids. After all, children 40,000 years ago were anatomically modern. They would have gotten bored and wanted to play, or missed their parents while the parents were out foraging or hunting.
doctoboggan
today at 3:51 AM
If you read the "Manufacture" section you will find this:
> Wulf Hein and Kurt Wehrberger conducted an experimental replication with the kinds of stone tools available at the time. Removing the base of the tusk took ten hours. The body was carved with a steep-fronted scraper; the burins requiring regular resharpening. Several tools were needed to separate the torso from the insides of the arms while shaping the head and shoulders, which involved difficult cutting across the grain of the ivory, often requiring two hands on the tool. The basic shaping is estimated to have taken around 200 hours, and in total the recreation likely took more than 370 hours.[d] Jill Cook, Curator of Palaeolithic collections at the British Museum, suggests that "unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months, someone as skilled as an artist may have been excused from other subsistence tasks to work specially on this piece."[23]
Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this, so I do not think it was simply a children's toy.
fishfasell
today at 12:52 AM
Been reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", this piece is mentioned as the earliest proof of the Cognitive Revolution that we know of. It displays how humans were able to envisions things that do not exist, crafting fiction from reality. How early man was able to share stories and how religions probably came to be.
solidasparagus
today at 2:22 AM
Sapiens is super loose about interpreting facts carefully, particularly the prehistory part.
Isn't that begging the question? For one, people can wear a lion headdress, making it something that does exist in real life. Secondly, it seems to be carved from a single tusk, which might have forced some choices when it comes to anatomy, rather than being "as conceived".
card_zero
today at 3:09 AM
Heh. "What does it signify, this lion with a man's body?" - "ran out of space".
But that's also just ignoring the fact that humans seem inherently drawn to the fantastic, whether in religion or something else. There isn't really any reason to believe that wouldn't have existed 40k years ago, correct?
That's what they mean by begging the question; you don't really get much useful information from trying to cite something as evidence of what you've already assumed.
For those interested in very early human history, this 2010 documentary by Werner Herzog:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
It was filmed in 3D as was the hype at the time, but the 2D version is completely watchable and is the most commonly distributed format.
Still more compelling than most modern AI art. The sheer imagination and skill from that era are astounding.
thisisauserid
yesterday at 11:36 PM
The Eurasian Cave Lion was around there back then and was probably the direct model for the Lion-man sculpture. It was roughly 20% larger than modern African lions. Paleolithic cave paintings (e.g., Chauvet) show the male cave lions lacked the heavy neck manes of modern lions.
wpollock
today at 12:39 AM
> ... so why would a community living on the edge of subsistence, whose primary concerns were finding food, keeping that fire going, protecting children from predators, allow someone to spend so much time away from those tasks?
One possibility that occurs to me is the carving was done by the elderly, the injured, or possibility the young, who would not have such duties. A carving by a shaman is another possibility.
bee_rider
today at 1:32 AM
I think it doesn’t really need much explaining anyway. Just from their example, 2/3 of those tasks (keeping the fire going and protecting from predators) required just… being awake and reasonably alert. I mean you could spend the time sitting around the fire making arrows (or spears or whatever, not sure what they had in year 40k BC), but maybe they ran out of nice stones to sharpen.
Probably most of us would not want to trade places with a substance hunter/gatherer, but their lives had downtime, right? I would expect their lives to be punctuated by good downtime (got enough food to eat and a good supply of tools, time to relax) as well as bad downtime (wasn’t successful at hunting or gathering, ran out of resources to process).
tyrabound
today at 2:02 AM
You are deceived by the propaganda that was largely pushed to promote and rationalize industrial age interests and exploit industrial labor camp factory inmates. Even above people have said things like “no one would want to trade with a subsistence life”, which is based on the assumption that their life of being a wage and/or debt slave or slaver of the system is a superior state of being. Merely historical artifacts we have found and what we can plausibly piece together tell us that at least people’s lives had meaning and were authentic, which most people today in the West simply cannot say with any sincerity.
Are you better off because you can play video games and doom scroll while stuffing yourself with people shop chemicals and then take lizard toxin to control your diabetes and lose weight without doing anything while you have approaching zero authentic human connection, let alone culture not astroturfed by some corporate profit maximizing creative studio?
At least if you’re doing light farming and harvesting and’s spending all your day with your people practicing your cultural traditions passed down through the eons, you’re actually human, not whatever this is in the west today that is having its humanity destroyed by a parasite with every passing day.
The idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were running around 16 hours a day with no downtime is a fantasy to begin with. They had more leisure time than early farmers and many Americans[1]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0614-6
godwinson__4-8
today at 1:53 AM
Just as animals in the wild - especially other apex predators - spend a lot of time sleeping/lounging. A famous example - the lion.
edelbitter
today at 12:59 AM
That question does not require any greater explanation than "there was little else to be done, besides waiting for the storm to subside".
The human-animal hybrid immediately brought shamanism to my mind.
tesnorindian
today at 2:13 AM
In Hindu religion, lion man is called Lord Narasimha, the 4th avatar of Lord Vishnu. He is often worshiped in Ahobilam, Andhra Pradesh, India. This avatar is after Wild Bohr (Varaha) which wandered the forests before it took the avatar of Lion man and settled in caves.3rd and 4th avatars' common link was both were mammals.Second was Tortoise (Reptile) and first was Fish (Aquatic vertebrates)
card_zero
today at 3:00 AM
Hey look, simha/simba, check out the false cognate.
Wild Niels Bohr sounds pretty dangerous.
drTobiasFunke
today at 2:44 AM
[flagged]
comrade1234
yesterday at 11:45 PM
I had a project at the Smithsonian's conservation analytical laboratory in the later 90s and made friends with a girl working in the lab that was working on these:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251028779_Three_lat...
(The timing is right at least and the lead author is from the Smithsonian)
She probably shouldn't have but she let me hold them in my hands. You could see that they were made by stuffing a skull with grass then putting the clay over the skull - you could see the grass imprints on the inside. I think they were from 9000 BC, Syria region. Pretty much brand new compared to this lion.
andsoitis
last Sunday at 12:53 AM
Between 35,000 and 41,000 years old. Germany.
orsenthil
today at 1:01 AM
TIL that Humans have been around for more than 40,000 years! I thought we started around 1000s of BC.
wewewedxfgdf
today at 1:39 AM
A 67,800-year-old hand stencil was discovered in a limestone cave on Muna Island in Sulawesi, Indonesia
The Madjedbebe rock shelter in the Australian Northern Territory show that people lived in Australia at least 65,000 years ago where stone tools, ground ochre for paint, and food remains were found.
The Neanderthals were still around, until a few tens of thousands of years ago. We lived in the same time and place as them, and occasionally had kids together.
harrylove
today at 12:21 AM
40k years from now, a hominid excavates a computer and materializes a login page in the ether. "We think they used this for ritual sacrifice or to brush their teeth or both."
clickety_clack
today at 12:41 AM
It appears to be a primitive game where the user tries to guess which of 9 images contains “traffic lights” or “motorcycles” (whatever they are).
doginasuit
today at 4:13 AM
An ancient ritual they believed would prove their humanity and worthiness of access to arcane engines of search.
40k years from now archaeologists explore a former landfill, find an adult toy and enter into endless academic debate about whether it was really a dildo
user00005
today at 12:33 AM
[flagged]
Box disintegrated in the rain, but product is in fair used condition for its age.