Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura
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How it came to be
About 43,000 years ago, during the last ice age, modern humans first reached Europe, and some of them settled in the limestone valleys of the Swabian Jura in southern Germany. Six caves in the Lone and Ach valleys hold Aurignacian layers dated from 43,000 to 33,000 years ago.
Excavations since the 1860s have turned up small carvings of cave lions, mammoths, horses, cattle, birds and fish, figures that are half animal and half human, a single statuette of a woman, and ornaments. More than 200 ivory fragments dug from Hohlenstein-Stadel in 1939 were pieced together in 1969 into a 31-centimetre figure with a lion's head. Flutes made of bone are the oldest musical instruments yet found anywhere.
In 2008 a woman carved from mammoth ivory more than 40,000 years ago was dug out of Hohle Fels. It is the oldest undisputed depiction of a human being and is kept at the prehistory museum in Blaubeuren. The caves were inscribed in 2017.
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