The Long Way Back to Ourselves

1.4

The Lion Man: The Birth of Fiction

This episode centers on the Lion Man, a roughly 40,000-year-old ivory figure with a human body and a lion's head, whose carving one technician reconstructed at several hundred hours of work. It corrects the assumption that this labor was minor: someone else had to feed the carver for weeks while he produced nothing anyone could eat, which the chapter treats as the real finding. You hear competing readings of Ice Age art, from Henri Breuil's hunting-magic theory, disproven by mismatches between painted and eaten species at Lascaux, to David Lewis-Williams's shamanistic reading. What matters, the episode argues, is that a community spent real food and time on a being that exists nowhere in nature.