This is the Lion Man, found in Hohlenstein-Stadel, in Germany, it is 40,000 years old, and represents
a significant piece of evidence that human culture was evolving significantly at the
time this was made. But why was it evolving, and to what purpose? It’s time to talk about
the birth of the gods. I’m Jon White, and welcome to Crecganford. When people talk about
this Lion Man, they often talk about its physical properties, it is an amazing looking artefact,
crafted with skill around 40,000 years ago. But its appearance on the archaeological timeline
shows us that the human mind was evolving significantly at this time, and this resulted
in a change that made our ancestors in Europe, the ones who were already anatomically the
same as us, it made them behave far more like distinctly modern humans than their ancestors.
And so we can ask ourselves, did this evolutionary change bring about the birth of the gods,
and eventually a desire to perform other cultural innovations, such as make Tik Toks. But in
this video we’re going to concentrate on the god part of that. Now human culture has
been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and during the initial rise of homo sapiens
around 300,000 years ago until about 200,000 years ago there was little in the way of creative
change. And it’s very likely that these ancestors of ours didn’t think of gods,
or consider animism, and it certainly looks like there weren’t any rituals that were
practised. And to emphasise this, if we look at stone tools being used by them, which could
arguably be called a form of proto-culture, after all, these tools are objects formed
and shaped from the human mind, they don’t exist naturally, then we see no distinct improvement
in these stone tools over this time period. And so it would be appropriate to think that
there were no other cultural developments at this time, as tooling seems to be one of
the key benefits to being human back then. It gave us a distinct advantage over other
animals. But at some point cultural change did happened, and it didn’t just affect
stone tools, it was an evolution of social behaviours, rather than a transmission of
same ideas between people, and this later behaviour is seen in a number of animal species.
But the evolution of cultural behaviour seems unique to humans, and one of the first undeniable
and tangible examples of this evolution is this Lion Man statuette. But was the Lion
Man a god? Well let’s go back to 100,000 years ago, when we see the earliest evidence
of human’s living and thinking slightly differently than before, there was the emergence
of cutting blades from flint, then representational art and personal ornaments such as necklaces,
and from this we slowly see the development of more complex living spaces, burial rituals,
and the ability to access new food sources in more efficient ways, especially aquatic
foods. And alongside these cultural changes there was probably some correlation to a rise
in the complexity of speech, although it often argued that speech evolved a little more slowly.
But these more complex cultural behaviours needed more complex words to explain them.
Now if we look at one of the earliest ritual behaviours, which was burial ritual, it showed
an understanding of what being human is, and so a consideration of a place where the dead
go. And I’m not talking heaven and hell here, but an after world, an often considered
underworld, there was no judgement made on the person, just a journey that was difficult,
or almost impossible for a living person to make to get there. And this is reflected in
the Ferryman story I talk about here, a myth that is over 20,000 years old. But what we
also see in these early rituals is the need for protection, people wanted to be protected
from chaos, from bad things happening, from death. The world is a cruel place and was
far more so 20,000 plus years ago. To live into adulthood was the exception to the rule,
and I expect women had many children to compensate for the odds that many wouldn’t survive.
And this is something seen amongst poor parts of the world now, or in nature amongst animal
species that suffer large loss in their children due to the environmental conditions, including
predators. And so we see evidence that suggests primitive religious behaviours were practiced,
with “spirits” representative of gods. And this is something that was still significant
among many traditional religions until the Greeks started the process of euhemerisation
and eventually Christianity and the personification of gods became almost de-facto, and this would
influence those of other cultures they came into contact with. Through cultural evolution,
as if one culture sees another more successful culture have religious aspects that aren’t
seen in the less successful culture, then that less successful culture may adopt those
religious practices. And this is seen all the time throughout history, especially around
the Mediterranean several thousand years ago. But I must get back on track here, and so
when we look at all these cultural outputs together, these changes from 100,000 years
ago to around 50,000 years ago, we see their variety, utility, and their aesthetic value,
and all together they show the human mind aligning towards what we would consider today,
the thoughts and processes that a modern mind would have. But then around 40,000 years ago,
right in the middle of Europe, we see something amazing happen. Now at this point in time
the Earth is going through a warm patch, in between some cold spells, and at Hohlenstein-Stadel
cave, and other caves across the region, statuettes of zoomorphic creatures started to appear,
alongside musical instruments, and statuettes of women, of which I have some replicas behind
me, all of which were being created by members of what we know now as the Aurignacian culture.
These Aurignacians were hunter gatherers, and whose DNA showed their ancestors had migrated
from the Near East, settling along the path of the Danube and across Europe, and down
towards the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Now the statuettes they created
were not only of creatures that existed, but some were of creatures that didn’t exist,
what we would call mythological beings. And the creation of these mythological beings
allow us to understand that something evolutionary, in fact revolutionary, was going on in the
human mind. And what is remarkable for the time, is that someone has sat down and imagined
a man and a lion as one being. And this is an idea that sits outside the confine of the
carver’s locale because such an animal has never existed, and to think of this idea,
and to produce something that is of use in a cultural and ritualistic way, this required
a way of thinking that hadn’t been clearly observed before this point. And it is difficult
for us to image that, we are used to seeing imagined objects literally every second of
every day. But at the point the Lion Man was carved, nothing like this had existed before,
or nothing that we have found in the archaeological record. And so, let’s look at his Lion Man
to try and understand why it tells us so much about the evolution of the human mind, and
what was the carver thinking when carving this figure. Well, we know the cave lion was
the largest and most dangerous predator in the region at the time the statuette was made,
and so likely a source of fear and awe due to this power and aggression. And cave lions
were around up to 5ft high, and were 12 feet long, and weighed in at around 750lb, these
were beasts that were much bigger than the average man at the time, bigger than today’s
lions in Africa. And so this all made it a prime candidate to represent in some form,
it was dangerous, and as mentioned earlier people wanted protection. And so the carver
has to comprehend representing it, using a mammoth tusk, and that is the first fascinating
part of this creational journey. In effect whilst humans were anatomically similar from
around 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, this behavioural modernity involved further evolution
not only through environmental influences, but almost certainly some genetic mutation
as well. The theory behind this, which is based on Gabor and Steel’s 2020 paper “A
model of the transition to behavioural and cognitive modernity using reflexively autocatalytic
networks”, and I’ll put a link to that, that is based on the theory that the burst
of creativity here in the Palaeolithic was due to the onset of contextual focus, so having
the capacity to switch between various modes of thought, which is similar to the theory
that human cognition is distinguishable from other animals by its ability to dual process
information, or an easy way to explain this difference is that humans started to be to
place an idea from one thought into a different context, and thus form a new idea from it.
In its primitive form it is using a stick as a weapon or a stone as a hammer, but here
the complexity is many levels higher. So whilst it may seem natural to us to think like this,
40,000 years ago, to think of making this statuette, the artist must have thought that
lion’s kill, and therefore represent power and that humans need to be protected from
them. That lions are animals, and so are animate beings, but can be represented in a statuette.
But also that to possess the lion’s power, one needed a lion figurine in a shape of a
man. But then the artist also needs to think that stone is too difficult to carve this,
and so softer material is required, such as ivory, and different tools are required, so
new tools are created to carve this figure. So what does this all mean? It means through
objects such as the Lion Man we see cognitive mechanisms evolve, and with this came the
birth of culture that could represent these ideas. And the representation of these ideas,
the figurines that were created, allow us to see this development in culture allowing
us to try and work out the ideas they represent. And so what did the Lion Man represent? Well,
first off some people thought this could be a bear, or a lioness, but most academics do
not support this view anymore, especially with the finding of additional fragments in
the late 1960s of this statuette which helped build this two armed version of the lion man,
the original one was only singled armed that it only had one arm. And this representation
of a cave lion and a man, combined, with the cave lion attentive, looking straight at you,
it is a figure that is paying attention to you, listening to you. And this listening
is understood because of how precisely the ears have been carved, the carver had excellent
knowledge of how the muscles in a lion’s ear worked. The mouth is also unusual, it
is not representative of a lion’s mouth, but that of a human, and it isn’t symmetrical,
it has a slight undulation, as though it represents the lion talking. Although there aren’t
any studies that have been carried out specifically on his mouth, and what this interpretation
should be, so that can be considered speculative. But the lion man may not actually be standing,
it could be viewed as laying down on his back, levitating, or in flight. And certainly, having
him laying down would make sense as there would be no easy way to stand him up unless
it was leaning against something. And the body has been artificially smoothed, and this
is due to it being held many times, possibly rubbed, you can feel the subtle wear on the
body where many fingers have held it over time. And this has been interpreted that the
statuette was being passed around, being rubbed, or certainly being handled many times, then
again it could possibly be held by just a particular member of the tribe repeating these
rubbing or holding gestures, possibly even rituals, and this was repeated over many generations
as the tribes travelled between pre-historic Britain and Greece. But is the lion man a
powerful, extraordinary piece of art, or did it hold profound cultural significance which
would have been shared by a whole tribe? Does it represent a hunting totem to allow lions
to be more easily caught? Or a tribal totem, allowing those holding it to be allowed to
talk in gatherings? Or is it a talking stick, perhaps providing oracle like advice through
a Shaman? A being from the spirit world? And any answer we give to this can only be speculative
because our understanding of the culture and beliefs at this time are near non-existent.
But we know our ancestors have identified specific animals with ancestor figures, when
performing ancestor worship, and most of these animals were half-human hybrids, with a human
body and an animal’s head. And amongst our ancestors there have been lion gods, such
as Narasimha in Vedic culture of India, and Leo the constellation. However, other carvings
of lions have been found in caves in the area, I have this lion’s head from Vogelherd.
And again, we see the ears are alert, as though it is listening, and the mouth could be considered
more human shaped than lion shaped. A consistency in a concept of a lion representing a specific
thing to people at the time. This is a statuette that represents power, that you spoke to,
either to make the lions listen to you, or for you to obtain a lion spirit. And there
is no doubt a story that would have been told with this at some point, a story that itself
has now been lost forever. But rituals bring people together, to perform a common routine,
to believe in a common good, that is a purpose of ritual. It used to be thought, before the
lion man was discovered, that religion only developed after writing, to let our ancestors
conceive ideas about the supernatural. But now we know there were stories long before
this, and the discovery of such a piece of art challenges that further. The person who
created this statuette didn’t hunt, or fish, or cook, or make hunting tools, they concentrated
on creating this figure. A process that would probably have taken a couple of months minimum,
and around 400 hours of effort. And you do not do this unless these is a perceived purpose,
an agreed purpose by the community you’re in, if your primary requirement for survival
is to be hunter-gatherers. This statuette has to be more than art. It seems clear from
the evidence that has emerged in recent decades that the people of the Lion Man were as human
as we are. The perception that our ancestors of the time were cavemen with little intelligence
should long be excised to the history books of the past. Our 40,000 year old ancestors,
in Europe at least, were clearly sensitive, creative, expressive people who had understood
what it mean to be part of a tribe, having identified the power of the lion, and used
this representation as a way of giving them power to eventually take the lion’s crown
to become the dominant species in Europe, and eventually beyond. This lion man statuette
must have been considered as having power, its uniqueness and quality oozes this, and
this is the first tangible example we see of such an object of such size and quality
in the world. In effect it was a totem, at a time when people were probably starting
to call themselves by a name, and this sense of individuality and therefore ancestry was
starting to be a consideration in the mind, maybe itself influencing the evolution of
culture. And it was shortly after this, in the same region that we see the creation of
what are sometimes called Venuses and instruments. And I hope to talk about these in another
video in the future, if you find this video interesting, let me know below. To me, well,
I say this is a video about the birth of the gods, the European gods, the seeds are certainly
being planted for the Indo-European gods to emerge 40,000 years ago, but this isn’t
the birth of religion, no one can really say how that happened across multiple cultures
of the world at different times, apart from suggesting there are arbitrary reasons for
it to happen. What this video really is about is the birth and expansion of a cultural evolution,
a revolution as I suggested earlier, and for man to be able to explain items in his mind
in other contexts, and it is this that led to the birth of the gods that would evolve
in what we see today. This was more than animism, the most basic form of religion, this was
a step towards shamanism, and the development of the totem. And it would start a process
of cultural conflict that would continue onto this day. I hope you enjoyed that talk about
the Lion Man, and until the next video, please stay safe, and stay well. And this was Crecganford.