A bit of a meta comment: I love when wikipedia articles are posted to HN, I always click on them as I know they will be interesting. On one of the recent wikipedia article posts (Glacier Mice I believe) someone commented that there should be a bluesky bot that collects and posts these so I (well Claude..) made one!
> 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.
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.
> > The basic shaping is estimated to have taken around 200 hours, and in total the recreation likely took more than 370 hours.
> Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this
Sorry, I think you may be mistaken? From the section you quote, it looks like it's about 370 hours, or 9 weeks of full time effort. That's still a lot, but certainly not nearly a year.
I can also imagine that someone with a lot of practice might be significantly faster than some unskilled researchers.
I also don't think it rules out it being something for a child. It's not so rare to do big projects for you kids even today, over many evenings and weekends. And when you don't have any books to read or screens to watch...
>Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this
You uh, missed a decimal point there. A year at 40 hours/week would be 2000 hours, not 200. The quote "unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months" seems accurate in light of that, but rather odd: why wouldn't it be created slowly at odd moments over several months, or even years? Was prehistoric man lacking in free time? The article eventually continues: "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?" Keeping a fire going or protecting from predators are tasks with rather a lot of down time. I can easily imagine a person doing either of those while also whittling on a piece of bone. It's also just ridiculous to assume that subsistence living meant being constantly on the verge of starvation. Sometimes times were bad, and many people died. Then later, times were good, food could be obtained easily, and plenty of time would be left over for leisure tasks.
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.
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".
Wouldn't you be wearing a lion headdress for some kind of symbolic reason though? Like it's not a very practical piece of clothing. I would guess you either want to draw some kind of parallel between yourself and lions, or maybe remind people that you're strong enough to have killed a lion. I don't think there are any animals that take hunting trophies like that.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
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).
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]
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)
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.
(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.
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."
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
A bit of a meta comment: I love when wikipedia articles are posted to HN, I always click on them as I know they will be interesting. On one of the recent wikipedia article posts (Glacier Mice I believe) someone commented that there should be a bluesky bot that collects and posts these so I (well Claude..) made one!
https://bsky.app/profile/hnwiki.bsky.social
Check it out!
This article is the first post, and if there is 48 hours with no posts, then one from the archives is posted.
> 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.
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.
EDIT: Not a year, actually just over 2 months.
> > The basic shaping is estimated to have taken around 200 hours, and in total the recreation likely took more than 370 hours.
> Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this
Sorry, I think you may be mistaken? From the section you quote, it looks like it's about 370 hours, or 9 weeks of full time effort. That's still a lot, but certainly not nearly a year.
I can also imagine that someone with a lot of practice might be significantly faster than some unskilled researchers.
I also don't think it rules out it being something for a child. It's not so rare to do big projects for you kids even today, over many evenings and weekends. And when you don't have any books to read or screens to watch...
Ya, I tend to agree. I think I personally have spent 9 weeks of effort on gifts for 2-3 people in my lifetime, and I don't even have kids yet.
That’s because you don’t have kids yet.
Yes you are right not sure how I flubbed that one. Made an edit in my comment.
Too busy thinking about sex and religion.
>Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this
You uh, missed a decimal point there. A year at 40 hours/week would be 2000 hours, not 200. The quote "unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months" seems accurate in light of that, but rather odd: why wouldn't it be created slowly at odd moments over several months, or even years? Was prehistoric man lacking in free time? The article eventually continues: "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?" Keeping a fire going or protecting from predators are tasks with rather a lot of down time. I can easily imagine a person doing either of those while also whittling on a piece of bone. It's also just ridiculous to assume that subsistence living meant being constantly on the verge of starvation. Sometimes times were bad, and many people died. Then later, times were good, food could be obtained easily, and plenty of time would be left over for leisure tasks.
Well, except for finger flutings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_fluting some of which were made by toddlers being held aloft to reach the ceiling.
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.
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.
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".
Wouldn't you be wearing a lion headdress for some kind of symbolic reason though? Like it's not a very practical piece of clothing. I would guess you either want to draw some kind of parallel between yourself and lions, or maybe remind people that you're strong enough to have killed a lion. I don't think there are any animals that take hunting trophies like that.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
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).
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
Just as animals in the wild - especially other apex predators - spend a lot of time sleeping/lounging. A famous example - the lion.
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.
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)
Hey look, simha/simba, check out the false cognate.
Wild Niels Bohr sounds pretty dangerous.
Between 35,000 and 41,000 years old. Germany.
TIL that Humans have been around for more than 40,000 years! I thought we started around 1000s of BC.
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.
There are stone tools half a million years old. Who do you think made them?
More than 300,000 years.
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.
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.
Still more compelling than most modern AI art. The sheer imagination and skill from that era are astounding.
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."
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).
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
Ahh the good old Nacirema
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema
You might enjoy the book "The Weans" by Robert Nathans, <https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2664067-the-weans>
And Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay, published in 1979. I read it as a child and recall enjoying it.