The Work of Making Meaning: Why Ice Age Humans Carved Birds at Hohle Fels
Two mammoth-ivory birds recovered from the Aurignacian layers of Hohle Fels are scarcely larger than a thumbnail, yet their makers invested considerable skill in objects that neither cut, scraped nor hunted. Their discovery revives a difficult archaeological question: what did image-making actually do for the first Homo sapiens communities of Ice Age Europe? In 2025, excavators working inside Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura recovered two pieces of mammoth ivory from the lower Aurignacian de