The most important thing to remember about prehistoric humans
is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment
than gorillas, fireflies, or jellyfish.”
–Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
How is it that a band of unexceptional animals wandering the savannah in East Africa became the rulers of the world? I’ve always been fascinated by this question, and have admired the efforts of archaeologists delving into the earth for answers. It’s a complex answer no doubt, but one of the qualities that must have made it possible is human imagination. When did humans become aware, creative and mindful, and where’s the proof?
When tangible proof was discovered, it came in the form of an ivory statuette found buried in a limestone cave in southwest Germany. The twelve-inch figurine, which has the body of a man and the head of a lion, is known as the “Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel Caves.” Although not very catchy, the cumbersome name belies the incredible significance of the find.
After 40,000 years buried in cave mud, it’s surprising that the fragile mammoth ivory survived at all. Archaeologist Robert Wetzel discovered the original fragments in 1939, then he promptly marched off to war and it got stuffed in a drawer for 30 years. It took another 40 years years, but after repeated excavations and a painstaking restoration the astonishing importance of the find was finally realized.
The completed statue has an ancient patina and rustic appeal, but it takes an expert eye and a bit of the archaeological backstory to truly appreciate its astounding significance for our knowledge of human history. For, as Harari says in Sapiens, “This is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably religion, and the ability of the human mind to imagine things that don’t really exist.”
Think about the full implications of the Lion Man for a moment and what it represents. Forty thousand years ago one of the first human artists, living among cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers, created a mental picture and then carved something that didn’t exist in nature: a fusion of man and animal.
The BBC Series Living with the Gods calls it an “imaginative leap,” and even though we know when it happened, we can’t answer why or what it meant to our distance ancestors. Was the Lion Man a deity, a benign protector, or a spirit guide? Regardless of the true meaning, for these early humans it was tangible proof of an intangible idea … and the beginnings of belief.
“Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can
believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination,
such as gods, states, money and human rights.”
–Yuval Noah Harari
From the top of the pyramid, our modest beginnings are so far in the misty past that it’s easy to take for granted how far we’ve come. But our ability to visualize things in our mind, both good and bad, is one of the game-changing talents that made us human … and the Lion Man was the beginning.
Good Health and Happy Trails,
P.S. The seed of the idea for this post came from Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent, and wildly popular book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. There’s a reason it was so successful, and for anyone interested in the story of human history and how we got where we are, it’s highly recommended.