For more than 20 years, German archaeologists thought they had found a figure in the shape of a horse. It was the first work of art made of ivory recovered from the Hohle Fels cave ('hollow rock', in German), in the Swabian Alb, a mountain range located in southwestern Germany.
The site, declared World Heritage, has been gaining importance in recent decades due to the large number of great discoveries from the Upper Paleolithic, between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago. From musical instruments to prehistoric art, humans left their creations on the site for centuries.
Among all the remains, the researchers found in 1999 a carved head that was interpreted to be part of the body of an equine. Recent excavations in the same place have made it possible to find the rest of the figure, which fit perfectly with the first part, according to the experts in an article published in the Archaeological Excavations in Baden-Württemberg magazine.
The first conclusion reached by the team led by Professor Nicholas Conard, from the Department of Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen, is that what they had in front of them was not a horse. "We can't yet identify for sure the animal species depicted, but it could be a cave lion or cave bear," he says.
Conard himself takes a position in the debate and defends that this work of art from the Upper Paleolithic is a bear. "The figurine now has a massive body, shows the typical pronounced bear hump at the shoulders, and is presented in a pose that could mimic the trotting gait of a plantigrade," he says.
But the Tübingen professor also admits that there are his colleagues who attributed to the figure the anatomical and physiognomic properties of a cave lion. "It is never easy to identify Ice Age depictions with certainty, especially when they are preserved in such fragmentary form. So it makes sense that we would diligently search for the missing parts of this animal in the coming years."
In fact, the figure of the animal is now made up of five fragments recovered in different years of excavation. Shortly after 1999, a small piece of the cheek was identified among the ivory finds and compared to the head, which had been broken off in the neck area.
The newly discovered fragment measures 3.99 centimeters long, 2.49cm high and another 0.55 centimeters thick. In addition, it presents several fine line patterns deliberately engraved on one of its sides, identified as the animal's right shoulder and thorax.
This led the researchers to search for other parts of the statuette among the many ivory finds at Hohle Fels. And they were successful. Thanks to the engravings it was possible to discover another small part of the right side of the body and a piece of the torso attached to the figure. Both present very fine lines that demonstrate the coherence of the composition. And what could be part of the left front leg has also appeared, although it cannot be directly connected to the rest of the body.
"This figure shows us and our visitors that the archaeological work is never done," says Dr. Stefanie Kölbl, managing director of the Blaubeuren Prehistoric Museum (urmu), who has been exhibiting the supposed 'horse's head' for the last few years. 20 years.
