Reference: Callaway, E. Nature News, 29 July 2026. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-02312-y
Primary source: Conard, N., Janas, A. & Zeidi, M. in Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Wurttemberg 2025, 45-52 (2026)
Deep in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany, inside the limestone chambers of Hohle Fels Cave, archaeologists have spent decades recovering evidence of humanity’s cognitive origins. The latest finds from the 2025 field season, a pair of tiny bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory and fragments of vulture-bone flutes, add another chapter to a story thirty years in the telling. These objects point to something larger than ornament or ritual. They suggest that the first figurative artworks ever created functioned as a kind of infrastructure: a system for storing and transmitting knowledge outside the human brain, built from ivory and bone, and concentrated in a single chamber no larger than a modest living room.
The Finds from the 2025 Season
The two newly reported figurines measure just 2 to 3 centimeters (0.8 to 1.2 inches) each. Both depict a ptarmigan of the genus Lagopus, a cold-adapted bird that still inhabits alpine and arctic regions. One shows the bird at rest, compact and still. The other is caught mid-flight, wings outstretched in a soaring posture that required its maker to work the ivory across multiple planes. Both were carved from mammoth ivory, the same material that yielded the Venus of Hohle Fels discovered at the same site in 2008, the oldest undisputed human figurine ever found.
Alongside the bird carvings, excavators recovered fragments of flutes made from vulture wing bones. These join musical instruments already recovered from the cave, including one from griffon vulture bone and another from mammoth ivory, both previously dated to roughly 40,000 years ago and recognized as the earliest known musical instruments in the archaeological record.
The team, led by Nicholas Conard of the University of Tubingen, relies on painstaking methods refined over decades. Elisa Luzi, a paleontologist, and Quentin Schafer first spotted one of the bird figurines while sieving excavated soil through fine mesh with water. The cave’s sediment is excavated in 2 to 3 centimeter (0.8 to 1.2 inch) quadrants, each bucket washed through screens fine enough to catch every splinter of worked bone and fleck of ivory. No other site on Earth has yielded so many examples of figurative art from the dawn of the Aurignacian period, which began roughly 43,000 years ago.
Concentration in a Single Chamber
Hohle Fels has been producing such finds since the mid-1990s. The Venus figurine, dated to at least 40,000 years old, remains the most famous. But the cave has also yielded carvings of a waterfowl, a horse, an otter, and a feline figure excavators call the “little lion man.” About 25 kilometers (16 miles) away, at Hohlenstein-Stadel, a separate team recovered the better-known Lion Man, a 31 centimeter (12 inch) anthropomorphic statue of similar age.
What makes the Hohle Fels assemblage exceptional is not the age or quality of any single piece but their concentration. Every artwork from the cave has come from one chamber measuring roughly 8 by 9 meters (26 by 30 feet), located near the entrance. Over thousands of years, Aurignacian hunter-gatherers returned to this same small space and left an accumulating collection of carved figures, ornaments, and musical instruments. The chamber appears to have functioned as an anchor point where symbolic objects were deposited, revisited, and used across generations.
Art as External Memory
This concentration gives the new bird figurines their wider significance. Archaeologists have long debated why figurative art appears so abruptly in the European record around 43,000 years ago, coinciding with the spread of Aurignacian populations across the continent. The traditional explanation has emphasized symbolic expression as an indicator of advanced cognition. But the pattern at Hohle Fels suggests something more specific.
The argument advanced by Conard and his colleagues over years of excavation is that these objects represent a form of externalized memory. In a world without writing, without permanent settlements, and with oral tradition as the only means of passing knowledge between generations, portable artworks offered a different channel. A carved bird, a bone flute, a human figurine: each object encoded information that could be carried, shown, and interpreted by others who shared the same symbolic framework. The same small chamber, used repeatedly across centuries or millennia, became a repository where these encoded objects accumulated, forming a shared cultural database that outlasted any single individual.
This interpretation gains weight from the diversity of subject matter found in the chamber. The animal carvings depict species that would have been familiar to Aurignacian hunters: waterfowl, horses, carnivores, birds, and the large mammals of the Ice Age steppe. The flutes suggest that sound and music were part of the same symbolic system. The assemblage reads less like a collection of isolated art objects and more like a curated inventory of the human and natural world, stored in a single place.
Competitive Advantage in a Contact Zone
The timing of this symbolic explosion is not accidental. Aurignacian populations were spreading into a Europe already occupied by Neanderthals, who had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. The two groups overlapped for several millennia before Neanderthals disappeared from the fossil record around 40,000 years ago. Hohle Fels and the other Swabian caves sit in the heart of that contact zone.
Groups that could encode ecological knowledge about animal behavior, seasonal cycles, and resource locations into portable, durable objects would have been able to transmit that information more reliably across space and time than groups reliant solely on oral transmission. The concentration of such objects at a single site suggests that Hohle Fels may have been a node in a larger network, a place where knowledge was pooled, curated, and redistributed.
Comparative Context
The Swabian Jura figurines remain the only widely accepted examples of figurative carved art older than 35,000 years anywhere in the world, with one significant exception. On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, archaeologists have dated cave paintings of pigs and human figures to more than 51,000 years ago. But those are paintings on rock walls, not portable carvings. The two traditions are almost certainly independent inventions, separated by more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles). Together, they demonstrate that symbolic expression emerged in multiple regions around the same geological period, a convergence that strengthens the case for its cognitive importance.
The new Hohle Fels finds are reported not in a standard peer-reviewed journal but in the Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Wurttemberg, a German excavation yearbook. This reflects a practical reality of fieldwork: discoveries made during active excavation seasons are announced first in regional yearbooks to establish priority, with more detailed analytical studies following later. The bird figurines and flute fragments will undergo further dating, microscopic analysis of carving techniques, and comparison with the existing collection from the site.
What the Birds Tell Us
The choice of subject for the new figurines is itself revealing. Ptarmigans are birds of cold, open landscapes. They molt from brown summer plumage to white winter feathers, a seasonal transformation that Aurignacian hunters would have observed closely. A hunter who knew the ptarmigan’s habits understood something about seasonal change, about high-altitude resources, and about the broader patterns of the Ice Age ecosystem. Carving that knowledge into ivory made it available beyond the lifetime of any single hunter.
The soaring bird figurine is the more technically ambitious of the two. Working mammoth ivory at that scale and in three dimensions required skill, patience, and specialized tools. It also required a mental model of the finished form before carving began. The cognitive demands imply planning, abstraction, and the ability to hold a complex shape in working memory over the hours or days it took to produce.
The Road Ahead
The 2025 season has ended, but the sieving continues. The excavations have run for more than a quarter century, each year adding new pieces to the puzzle. The bird figurines and flute fragments will undergo further testing. They join one of the most remarkable collections ever assembled from a single Ice Age site.
What makes Hohle Fels significant is not simply that it contains old things. It contains them in numbers that defy statistical accident. The concentration of symbolic objects in one small chamber, produced and deposited over millennia, is the pattern that demands explanation. The cognitive infrastructure hypothesis offers one: that these objects were tools for thinking, for remembering, and for passing knowledge across generations of a species remaking the world in the deep Ice Age.