Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany has been a place of great interest to archaeologists since it was first excavated in 1870. Discoveries at the site date back as far as 43,000 years and include some of the earliest figurative art and oldest musical instruments ever unearthed. As the Hohle Fels excavation leader Nicholas Conard discusses in this short video, such discoveries point to complex Ice Age cultures built on myths, beliefs and rituals – that is to say, societies that were in many ways not so different from our own.
In particular, Conard turns to the recent discovery of two tiny ivory birds at the site to explore why he believes a sophisticated symbolic culture may have given humans an evolutionary advantage over other hominins, including Neanderthals. The story of the 16 bones that upended how we see our species Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals Although his story is a mystery, the Lion Man forever binds us to our prehistoric past Ancient Greek sculptures were colourful. Why does the white marble ideal persist?
Could grandmotherly love help to explain how we became human? At a prehistoric pigment mine, researchers glimpse our earliest moments in the Americas What the ‘Louvre of the desert’ reveals about the human story Last hominin standing – charting our rise and the fall of our closest relatives Human to fish, and back again: a brisk walk through our evolutionary history
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