"Lion man" Picture of a remote past dominated by animals, Löwenmensch, or lion man, reappeared after having spent almost fifty years in the basement of a museum, where it was broken into 200
pieces. Carved in a defence of mammoth, this 30 cm height statuette was found in the cave of Hohlenstein-Stadel, nearby the valley of Danube, line of possible migration towards Europe of men came from the Middle-East.
Among the masterpieces of the cave of Vogelherd appear a horse and a mammoth out of ivory.
The discovery of a flute of bone, in Geissenklösterle, confirms the existence of an artistic conscience..
approximately
less than 32.000 years A.D.
Sculpture of horn. Germany. Analyses with carbon-14 reveals that frescos come back to approximately 32 000 years, the animals in question kept suddenly more importance.
Their only "cultural" demonstrations left works which we admire now : drawings of animals and hunting which were undoubtedly their first concern, outline of hands or plugs and clay modelling and sculptures (including very realistic sexes of
men or women); all that sometimes at the bas of the cave, up to several hundred meters (Ariège), and surprisingly under a rock projection of a few tens of centimetres in height.
Cave man created memorial wall art describing animals of which lions (Cosquer, deep underwater cave, France), 20,000 years old A.C.
Like ourselves, they probably act under Pagan belief, testimony envy..
(partial drawing of Voutch)
The man known as "of the caves" ; around -20.000 years A.D, Europe knew a severe ice age, with temperatures dropping to - 40° - 50°, even - 70° C. On the north of the current France and until half way, extended a deserted
zone covered with ice almost all the year. The south of France looked like steppes of Central Asia; The prehistoric men (*) lived in full ice age, one of the hardest moments of the cyclic history of the terrestrial climate.
The chart of France, and more generally of Europe, was divided into three great zones. The first consisted of a cap of ice, called "ice cap", which covered the ground until a limit fluctuating around the axis Berlin-south of England.
The sea level was 110 meters lower than today.
The French Channel thus did not exist and the edges of the French coast." were several tens of kilometres towards the west, on what today is the continental step. Below, an area called "periglacial desert" extended from the medium of the today France.
This zone that the istorians describe as "vacuum" sheltered few animals and even less men.
It was completely covered with ice during the long winter.
(*) the discovery of a tool made called "Solutréen" the period of the Palaeolithic superior ranging between - 22 000 and -18 000.
(*) prehistoric cave man and wall art : the prehistoric man said "of the caves" would be a myth of our textbooks, myth maintained to better trap the tourists.
There are no clues of a "day to day" life in those; i.e. not traces of fires having been used to cook food, not remainders of bone of animals consumed on the spot, traces of manufacture of tools, not of dead..
This prehistoric man protected himself especially under what are called "rock shelters", perhaps supplemented with branches and hides. It may have been sheltered at the entrance of a cave occasionally, but little more. It is also not stated that human groups lived permanently near one of them.
(*) prehistoric cave man and wall art : the prehistoric man said "of the caves" would be a myth of our textbooks, myth maintained to better trap the tourists.
