Two bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory weigh 1.3 and 0.7 grams and fit on a fingernail. Archaeologists from the University of Tübingen recovered them in the Hohle Fels cave in the Swabian Jura. They were carved around 40,000 years ago. The one with outspread wings measures just two centimetres. It currently counts as the smallest known piece of Ice Age art from the region.
Both pieces lay roughly a metre and a half apart during the 2025 excavation season. They come from layers of the Aurignacian, the period associated with the arrival of modern humans on the upper Danube. The figurines are of much the same age and fit together stylistically. The researchers therefore think it possible that one person made both.
What stands out is less the age than the precision. Eyes and feather markings are visible. One figurine lies flat at rest, perhaps brooding over a clutch of eggs. The other extends its neck and wings: a bird taking off, landing on water, or in a courtship display. Its left wing has broken away.
Ptarmigan or capercaillie?
"Mammoth ivory was not simply used here to create a simplified form of a bird's body," says Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen and director of the excavations. "Detailed observations of nature were translated into figurines whose richness of detail even allows us to investigate which bird species is depicted and what it is doing."
That question is still open. One possibility is the ptarmigan, a cold-adapted member of the grouse family. Its bones turn up frequently at prehistoric sites in the region. Larger, pheasant-like birds such as the capercaillie are also plausible.
Hohle Fels is one of six caves in the Swabian Jura protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Excavations there since the 1860s have produced objects between 33,000 and 43,000 years old. Among them are animal figurines, early bone flutes and the Venus of Hohle Fels. UNESCO counts them among the oldest figurative art anywhere.
The two birds add more to that inventory than another catalogue entry. They show that Europe's earliest artists were not only setting down symbols but looking closely. And that they could render what they saw at the scale of a fingernail.