Post #4234878

Brand new old stuff! Tiny ivory figurines of birds made around 40,000 BC, recently found 1.5 meters apart in a cave called Hohle Fels in Germany. This art is typical of the Early Aurignacian culture - Cro-Magnons known for their fine flint blades, ivory carvings, and some of the earliest cave paintings. The glaciers had receded in Germany by this time: it was a steppe-tundra with regions of permafrost that supported mammoth, reindeer, horse, and bison. It was a time of rapid climate oscillations - the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles - swinging between mild and colder weather on timescales of centuries to a couple thousand years. It's really fun to imagine what it would be like to be an Aurignacian! For more, read this: https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/university/news-and-publications/press-releases/press-releases/article/two-bird-figurines-found-in-world-heritage-site-of-hohle-fels-are-declared-find-of-the-year/ You can get it in German or English.