The first fragments of the Lion-Man were recovered from Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in August 1939, days before Germany went to war. The pieces sat unstudied for decades before Robert Wetzel's team began reassembling them in 1969. What emerged — a thirty-one-centimetre figure carved from a single piece of mammoth ivory, with a human body and the head of a cave lion — has forced a rethinking of what Upper Paleolithic humans were capable of imagining.

The Lion-Man's significance is not its size or craftsmanship but what it represents. Unlike the Venus of Hohle Fels, it does not abstract an existing body; it gives material form to a creature that has no counterpart in nature. That is a step beyond abstract thought: it requires the ability to picture something purely invented and then make others see it too. It may be the oldest physical trace of myth, story, or belief.

Experimental archaeology has estimated that carving such an object with flint tools would have taken around four hundred hours — two months of full working days. For a hunter-gatherer band to release one member from subsistence for that long suggests the figure was anything but ornamental.

Radiocarbon dates place it in the early Aurignacian, around 38,000 BCE, though refinement continues. The figure is now displayed at the Museum Ulm and forms part of the UNESCO-listed Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura.