This is the oldest piece of figurative art discovered to date. Carbon dating places it at approximately 30,000 years old. It is old enough to have been the work of either early modern man or our neanderthal relatives. It was discovered by archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany, at the Hohle Fels cave near Ulm. As well as this "lion-man" other pieces included representations of a bird and a horse.

We can only guess at the meanings that pieces such as this had for their makers but the combination of both human and lion characteristics in the piece is significant. This signals an important develop in man where we augmented the concrete reality in which we find ourselves with the abstract world of symbols and metaphores. Objects such as these show a human mind that is making sense of and interpreting the world rather than just experiencing it. If they were, in fact, done by Neanderthal artists then we need to rethink our understanding of our near relatives. They may not have been as primitive as has been proposed.

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