History Changed

I'm a GTF this year, so I'm teaching two discussion sections, running reviews and answering (a bazillion) student emails. As a side note, when did students start emailing so much? I probably sent two emails as an undergrad. Anyway, I was reading through the new edition of Gardner's Art Through the Ages, an Art History 101 mainstay, since I start teaching next week and found something I'd never seen before. It's new to me, but it's oooold.

The professor I'm working for is great. He may or may not have given me a B one time on a paper, but I forget that (well-deserved) outrage when he starts teaching. This is the 30+ time he's taught survey, but he obviously loves doing it. Who wouldn't want to tell people about paleolithic art for the first time? You get to start your first lecture with the words "Millions of years ago..." I'll probably never teach this class, since I focus on Modern/Contemporary art, but I sort of wish I got to.

So, I'm going to teach you, blog reader, about the new-to-me statue that was discovered a few years ago.

Human with feline head, from Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany, ca. 30,000-28,000 BCE, mammoth ivory, Ulmer Museum

Did you get that? 30,000 BCE. Considering that Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel only 500 years ago, that's really old. 

There are still traces of pigment, so it was probably painted red...and the rest is a mystery. I will say though, this had to be important to someone, since creating it required hunting and killing a mammoth and then toting the statue around (it's about one foot tall) as you moved from place to place around Europe.

This is certainly not the oldest work of art, or even the oldest one we've discovered--there are a few incised lines on stone and one carving that may represent a face--but it's a rather exciting discovery. More importantly, I learned something new today. Sometimes I think I should take off to Southern Europe and start exploring caves. Brad would come with me, right? We could search for stenciled hands and herds of bison. Plus! I could be the historical expert on the Nova or the History Channel program about our discoveries (which is the ultimate goal, really). Paleolithic cave paintings, you know?