Is the Lion Man a Woman? Solving the Mystery of a 35,000-Year-Old Statue
The poor condition of the figurine has only made it more mysterious. Is it meant to represent a mythical creature, or a shaman hiding under an animal hide? Are the six stripes on the left upper arm meant to depict scarification marks or something else? And what was on the right arm, which is missing?
The genitalia are also unrecognizable. German archeologist and Upper Paleolithic expert Joachim Hahn has interpreted the small plate on the abdomen as a “penis in a hanging position.” Elisabeth Schmid, a paleontologist, classified it as a pubic triangle.
It was the beginning of a bitter dispute over the gender of the small idol that erupted in the 1980s and continues to this day. The statue has been made into an “icon of the women’s movement,” says Kurt Wehrberger of the Ulm Museum, the owner of the precious object.
Those who believe that the Lion Man is in fact a woman are convinced that primitive societies were matriarchal. They contend that women of the period, instead of standing obediently by the cooking fire and watching over the children, hunted mammoths and set the tone when it came to rituals and the priesthood. But is this true?
The debate remains undecided today. But that could soon change, now that new fragments of the Lion Man have turned up.
The new discoveries came after archeologists once again turned their attention to the Stadel cave. They sifted through all of the rubble from 1939, explains excavator Claus-Joachim Kind — and the results were sensational. “We found about 1,000 pieces, which presumably belong to the statue,” Kind says.
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