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Oldest Known Figural Art From A Culture You’ve Never Heard Of
Mysterious Universe
I love the art of sculpture. I’m not sure if it’s the three dimensional rendering of a subject, or some ineffable quality of the aesthetics, but either way, I’m hooked. I’m partial to Classical Greek, Roman and early Renaissance period sculpture, but there are plenty of styles and specific pieces outside of that narrow selection that I adore as well.
Like any art form though, sculpture is a practice, a tradition with an ancient origin. I know what you’re thinking, Classical Greece and Rome are the very definition of ancient from our perspective. But the art of sculpture is much older than that.
Long before the Egyptians had mastered their gilded statuary of Horace and Khufu, and even before they figured out how to build pyramids; before the various Mesopotamians perfected their relief carvings and figural artworks…there were the Aurignacians.
Löwenmensch on display at the Ulm Museum in Ulm, Germany
The name Aurignacians is actually just a place holder, since we know very little about them in terms of language and culture. It was given to them by modern researchers because they hailed from a place now called Aurignac, which is in Southern France. That’s a little misleading though, because they actually occupied nearly all of Europe; from Aurignac to as far north as Germany and well into western Asia. The Aurignacians showed up in the archaeological record circa 47,000 years ago, which means they were the first civilization of modern humans to populate Europe. They were, in fact, the very first European culture, preceded only by the so-called Cro-Magnon man who emigrated from Africa just prior to the Aurignacian proliferation between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. Their ancestral legacy includes the peoples of the Fertile Crescent – who eventually populated Mesopotamia – and early Siberian cultures, and they are thought to have been precedents for Proto-Indo-European language traditions.
Reposted with permission
