Fingernail-sized ivory birds push Ice Age art record in Swabian Jura
Archaeologists in southern Germany have unearthed two miniature mammoth ivory bird carvings dating back 40,000 years, adding to Europe's oldest known corpus of figurative art.
A team from the University of Tübingen has recovered two bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory in the lower layers of the Hohle Fels cave in the Swabian Jura. The carvings, attributed to the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Palaeolithic, are roughly 40,000 years old and were found only a metre and a half apart.
Both sculptures are small enough to rest on a fingernail, weighing 1.3 and 0.7 grams respectively. The better preserved piece shows a bird lying flat, possibly brooding on a nest. The second depicts a bird with outstretched wings and an extended neck, though its left wing has broken away. At just two centimetres long, that second figure is now considered the smallest known Ice Age artwork discovered in the region.
"Mammoth ivory was not simply used here to create a simplified form of a bird's body," said Nicholas Conard, the University of Tübingen archaeologist who leads the excavations. "Detailed observations of nature were translated into figurines whose richness of detail even allows us to investigate which bird species is depicted and what it is doing."
Researchers have not settled on a definitive species identification. The figurines may represent ptarmigan, a cold-adapted bird whose bones appear frequently at prehistoric sites in the area, or they could depict capercaillie, a larger woodland bird known for elaborate courtship displays. Both species were present in Europe during the Ice Age.
A deep archive of European culture
The find adds to a remarkable concentration of early artistic evidence already recovered from Hohle Fels and five neighbouring caves, which together hold UNESCO World Heritage status. The site has yielded some of the oldest known musical instruments, items of jewellery and figurative sculptures, including the roughly 41,000-year-old "Venus of Hohle Fels," widely regarded as one of Europe's earliest examples of figurative art.
Excavations in the caves date back to the 1860s, and artefacts ranging from 33,000 to 43,000 years old have been recovered over that span. The Aurignacian inhabitants were early Homo sapiens who arrived after Neanderthals had already disappeared from the continent, and their output documents a sudden flowering of symbolic and artistic expression.
For cultural institutions in Baden-Württemberg, the discovery reinforces the region's position as a reference point for the study of human creativity in Europe. The two new figurines will be on public display at the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art in Blaubeuren until 4 April 2027.
