40,000-year-old bird carvings provide clues to how ice age humans flourished

It’s 35 °C in the shade, amid Europe’s June heatwave, and Alexander Janas has just emerged from Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, where the mercury reads 9 or 10 °C. “It’s wonderful to be inside,” says Janas, an archaeologist at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment in Tübingen, Germany.

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It isn’t just the cool cave air that draws Janas and other archaeologists into Hohle Fels each summer. Over the past three decades, they have dug up one jaw-dropping find after another. These include expertly crafted objects such as the world’s oldest human figurine — the 40,000-year-old ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’ — and the earliest known musical instruments.

The artworks provide a window into the minds of some of Europe’s earliest Homo sapiens. Associated with a period called the Aurignacian, they are among the first humans known to leave behind depictions of their world. “We can almost look through the eyes of the Aurignacian people and see how they viewed the environment around them,” says Amy Clark, a palaeolithic archaeologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This week, Janas and his colleagues announced their latest treasures: a pair of tiny bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory, and vulture-bone flute fragments, discovered during the 2025 field season. The artefacts were unveiled at the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art in Blaubeuren, Germany, on 29 July and described in a German-language book chapter¹.

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“There’s something magical about these pieces,” says Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who has led the excavation of Hohle Fels since the late 1990s. Conard argues that the artistic capabilities on display at Hohle Fels and nearby caves mark a shift in cognitive and cultural sophistication that might have helped these humans to flourish in ice-age Europe, when other groups vanished. He now hopes to test this theory by collecting ancient DNA from Hohle Fels cave sediments.

“This is the ultimate laboratory,” says Conard, “Why did it happen here? What’s the driving force? And where does that take us?”

An artwork treasure trove

Humans today trace most of their ancestry to populations that emerged in Africa 200,000–300,000 years ago. Populating the rest of the world took time. The oldest unambiguous evidence for H. sapiens in Europe comes from remains that are more than 45,000 years old. But archaeological and genomic evidence suggests that these early explorers were wiped out. Later waves of hunter-gatherers, who were associated with Aurignacian technologies such as stone blades and bone points, appeared around 43,000 years ago, and later spread across the continent. From the Aurignacian period onwards, where European hunter-gatherers went, so did art and other forms of symbolic expression.

German for ‘hollow rock’, Hohle Fels is set in a river valley in a highland region called the Swabian Jura, which is pockmarked with similar cave systems. Before Conard arrived, the site had been explored and excavated on and off for more than a century. These digs have uncovered bones of mammoths, reindeer and other animals, as well as stone tools. Ivory figurines were found at other Swabian Jura caves, including a 31-centimetre-tall ‘Lion Man’ statue — roughly 40,000 years old — at the nearby Hohlenstein-Stadel cave. But these artworks were once thought to be rare, says Conard.

His team has been excavating Hohle Fels since 1997, unearthing figurines of a waterfowl, a horse, an otter, a 2.5-cm ‘little lion man’, in addition to nine fragments of the Venus, all carved from mammoth ivory. A nearly complete flute fashioned from bone of a griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus) lay 70 cm from the Venus. These all came from the Aurignacian layer, which has been dated to up to 42,500 years old.

The apparent explosion of artwork is unique. The only widely accepted figurative artworks — those depicting the real world — that are older than those from the Swabian Jura are cave paintings from Indonesia, including a painting of human and pig-like figures in Sulawesi dated to more than 51,000 years ago².

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All the Hohle Fels artworks recovered by Conard’s team come from an 8-by-9-metre chamber near the cave’s entrance. Janas and his colleagues excavate small quadrants of soil in this chamber of Hohle Fels, 2–3 cm in depth at a time, keeping all the sediment for later sieving through a fine mesh with water. The two new bird figurines found in this way resemble a relative of pheasants known as a ptarmigan (Lagopus sp.) — one resting, the other with wings outstretched and possibly soaring, both 2–3 cm long.

Elisa Luzi, a palaeontologist at the University of Tübingen, identified one of the new artworks while she and Quentin Schäfer, who is now an excavation technician at Baden-Württemberg state’s antiquity department in Germany, were scouring the filtered sediment for microfossils of rodents and other small animals. It was instantly recognizable as a bird, despite a missing wing. “You see this figurine and you feel the humanity of it all,” she says. “No one has seen these things for 40,000 years and we are the first ones to do it. It’s a privilege.”

Clark was in awe when Conard e-mailed her images of the two bird figurines, which she describes as “amazingly lifelike and vivid”. Thinking about the people who crafted them, she says, it’s apparent “how they were charmed by these animals”. But why they were made is anyone’s guess, she says.

“These objects were created with a purpose other than simple enjoyment,” says Daniel Adler, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. They might have helped early humans to hold onto memories or express group affiliation, he speculates. Lyn Wadley, a specialist in African archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, thinks that artworks such as the Venus and the bird figurines could have been used in rites of passage, including pregnancy and birth. Marks on some remind her of ritual scarification.

Modern replicas offer some insight into the level of care and craftsmanship that goes into such figurines. Melissa Stannard, a researcher at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia, and an artist with Yuwaalaraay Gamilaraay heritage, recreated the Venus figurine from a deer antler and other materials using the types of tool that would have been available to the early hunter-gatherers. She and Michelle Langley, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Brisbane, speculate that such objects were made and potentially used as storytelling devices about motherhood and as play toys³. A replica Lion Man statue took another researcher 360 hours to make from legally sourced elephant ivory⁴.