GoKawiilIt’s 35 °C in the shade, amid Europe’s June heatwave, and Alexander Janas has just emerged from 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 Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment in Tübingen, Germany.
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It isn’t just the cool cave air that draws Janas and other archaeologists into Hohle Fels each summer. Over the past three decades, they have dug up one jaw-dropping find after another. These include expertly crafted objects such as the world’s oldest human figurine — the 40,000-year-old ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’ — and the earliest known musical instruments.
The artworks provide a window into the minds of some of Europe’s earliest Homo sapiens. Associated with a period called the Aurignacian, they are among the first humans known to leave behind depictions 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 palaeolithic archaeologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A flute, carved from a vulture bone (right), was found less than one metre from the Venus of Hohle Fels Cave (left). The flute is one of the world’s oldest-known instruments, and its discovery suggests that the cave was once filled with music.Credit: H. Jensen, University of Tübingen
This week, Janas and his colleagues announced their latest treasures: a pair of tiny bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory, and vulture-bone flute fragments, discovered during the 2025 field season. The artefacts were unveiled at the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art in Blaubeuren, Germany, on 29 July and described in a German-language book chapter1.
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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 excavation of Hohle Fels since the late 1990s. Conard argues that the artistic capabilities on display at Hohle Fels and nearby caves mark a shift in cognitive and cultural sophistication that might have helped these humans to flourish in ice-age Europe, when other groups vanished. He now hopes to test this theory by collecting ancient DNA from Hohle Fels cave sediments.
“This is the ultimate laboratory,” says Conard, “Why did it happen here? What’s the driving force? And where does that take us?”
An artwork treasure trove
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