It’s 35°C in the shade, in the middle of Europe’s June heatwave, and Alexander Janas has just emerged from the Hohle Fels cave in southwestern Germany, where the mercury reads 9 or 10°C. “It’s wonderful to be inside,” says Janas, an archaeologist at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and the Paleoenvironment in Tübingen, Germany.

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It’s not just the fresh air of the caves that attracts Janas and other archaeologists to Hohle Fels every summer. Over the past three decades, they have unearthed one astonishing find after another. These include expertly crafted objects such as the world’s oldest human figure, the 40,000-year-old ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’, and the oldest known musical instruments.

The artworks offer a window into the minds of some of the earliest Europeans. Homo sapiens. Associated with a period called the Aurignacian, they are among the first humans to leave behind representations of their world. “We can almost look through the eyes of the Aurignacian people and see how they viewed the environment around them,” says Amy Clark, a paleolithic archaeologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This week, Janas and his colleagues announced their latest treasures: a pair of small bird figures carved from mammoth ivory and vulture bone flute fragments, discovered during the 2025 field season. The artifacts were presented at the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art in Blaubeuren, Germany, on July 29 and described in a chapter of a German-language book.¹.

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“There’s something magical about these pieces,” says Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who has led the Hohle Fels excavation since the late 1990s. Conard argues that the artistic abilities on display at Hohle Fels and nearby caves mark a shift in cognitive and cultural sophistication that might have helped these humans thrive in Ice Age Europe, when other groups disappeared. He now hopes to test this theory by collecting ancient DNA from the sediments of the Hohle Fels cave.

“This is the ultimate laboratory,” Conard says, “Why did it happen here? What’s the driving force? And where does that take us?”

A treasure of works of art

Today’s humans trace most of their ancestry to populations that emerged in Africa 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Populating the rest of the world took time. The oldest unequivocal evidence of Homo sapiens In Europe it comes from remains that are more than 45,000 years old. But archaeological and genomic evidence suggests that these early explorers were wiped out. Later waves of hunter-gatherers, associated with Aurignacian technologies such as stone blades and bone points, appeared about 43,000 years ago and then spread across the continent. Beginning in the Aurignacian period, where European hunter-gatherers went, so did art and other forms of symbolic expression.

Hohle Fels, which is German for “hollow rock”, is situated in a river valley in a mountainous region called the Swabian Alb, which is riddled with similar cave systems. Before Conard’s arrival, the site had been explored and excavated intermittently for more than a century. These excavations have uncovered bones from mammoths, reindeer and other animals, as well as stone tools. Ivory figurines were found in other caves in the Swabian Alb, including a 31 centimeter-high ‘Lion Man’ statue (approximately 40,000 years old) in the nearby Hohlenstein-Stadel cave. But these works of art were once thought to be rare, Conard says.

His team has been excavating Hohle Fels since 1997, unearthing figures of a waterfowl, a horse, an otter, a 2.5cm “little lion man”, plus nine fragments of Venus, all carved from mammoth ivory. An almost complete flute made of griffon vulture bone (Gyps fulvo) is located 70 cm from Venus. All of these came from the Aurignacian stratum, which has been dated to be up to 42,500 years old.

The apparent explosion of works of art is unique. The only widely accepted figurative works of art (those depicting the real world) that are older than those from the Swabian Alb are Indonesian rock paintings, including a painting of human and pig-like figures in Sulawesi that dates back more than 51,000 years.².

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All of the Hohle Fels artwork recovered by Conard’s team came from an 8 by 9 meter chamber near the cave entrance. Janas and his colleagues excavate small quadrants of soil in this Hohle Fels chamber, 2 to 3 cm deep at a time, saving all the sediment to later sift it through a fine mesh with water. The two new bird figures found in this way resemble a relative of pheasants known as the ptarmigan (lagopus sp.): one resting, the other with wings spread and possibly flying, both 2 to 3 cm long.

Elisa Luzi, a paleontologist at the University of Tübingen, identified one of the new works of art as she and Quentin Schäfer, who is now an excavation technician in the antiquities department of the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, searched the leaked sediment for microfossils of rodents and other small animals. It was immediately recognizable as a bird, even though it was missing a wing. “You see this figure and you feel the humanity of it all,” he says. “No one has seen these things for 40,000 years and we are the first to do so. It is a privilege.”

Clark was amazed when Conard emailed her images of the two bird figures, which she describes as “incredibly realistic and vivid.” When thinking about the people who made them, he says, it is evident “how they were enchanted by these animals.” But no one knows why they were made, he says.

“These objects were created for a purpose other than simple enjoyment,” says Daniel Adler, a paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. They could have helped early humans retain memories or express group affiliation, he speculates. Lyn Wadley, a specialist in African archeology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, believes that works of art such as the Venus and bird figurines could have been used in rites of passage, including pregnancy and birth. The marks on some remind you of ritual scarification.

Modern replicas offer an idea of ​​the level of care and craftsmanship that goes into these figures. Melissa Stannard, a researcher at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia, and an artist with Yuwaalaraay Gamilaraay heritage, recreated the figure of Venus from a deer antler and other materials using the types of tools that would have been available to early hunter-gatherers. She and Michelle Langley, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Brisbane, speculate that such objects were manufactured and potentially used as story-telling devices about motherhood and as toys.³. Another researcher took 360 hours to create a replica of the Lion Man statue using legally sourced elephant ivory.⁴.