Lion-man

A bit of a meta comment: I love when wikipedia articles are posted to HN, I always click on them as I know they will be interesting. On one of the recent wikipedia article posts someone commented that there should be a bluesy bot that collects and posts these so I (well Claude..) made one!

https://bsky.app/profile/hnwiki.bsky.social

Check it out!

This article is the first post, and if there is 48 hours with no posts, then one from the archives is posted.

> Some researchers have ascribed sexual characteristics to the object.

My wife jokes that anthropologists think everything is about either sex or religion. It never occurs to them that these figurines might be toys for kids. After all, children 40,000 years ago were anatomically modern. They would have gotten bored and wanted to play, or missed their parents while the parents were out foraging or hunting.

Been reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", this piece is mentioned as the earliest proof of the Cognitive Revolution that we know of. It displays how humans were able to envisions things that do not exist, crafting fiction from reality. How early man was able to share stories and how religions probably came to be.

The Eurasian Cave Lion was around there back then and was probably the direct model for the Lion-man sculpture. It was roughly 20% larger than modern African lions. Paleolithic cave paintings (e.g., Chauvet) show the male cave lions lacked the heavy neck manes of modern lions.

> ... so why would a community living on the edge of subsistence, whose primary concerns were finding food, keeping that fire going, protecting children from predators, allow someone to spend so much time away from those tasks?

One possibility that occurs to me is the carving was done by the elderly, the injured, or possibility the young, who would not have such duties. A carving by a shaman is another possibility.

For those interested in very early human history, this 2010 documentary by Werner Herzog:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams

It was filmed in 3D as was the hype at the time, but the 2D version is completely watchable and is the most commonly distributed format.

In Hindu religion, lion man is called Lord Narasimha, the 4th avatar of Lord Vishnu. He is often worshiped in Ahobilam, Andhra Pradesh, India. This avatar is after Wild Bohr (Varaha) which wandered the forests before it took the avatar of Lion man and settled in caves.3rd and 4th avatars' common link was both were mammals.Second was Tortoise (Reptile) and first was Fish (Aquatic vertebrates)

Between 35,000 and 41,000 years old. Germany.

Still more compelling than most modern AI art. The sheer imagination and skill from that era are astounding.

I had a project at the Smithsonian's conservation analytical laboratory in the later 90s and made friends with a girl working in the lab that was working on these: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251028779_Three_lat...

(The timing is right at least and the lead author is from the Smithsonian)

She probably shouldn't have but she let me hold them in my hands. You could see that they were made by stuffing a skull with grass then putting the clay over the skull - you could see the grass imprints on the inside. I think they were from 9000 BC, Syria region. Pretty much brand new compared to this lion.

40k years from now, a hominid excavates a computer and materializes a login page in the ether. "We think they used this for ritual sacrifice or to brush their teeth or both."

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