In 2008 a team led by Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen recovered six small fragments of mammoth ivory from the floor of Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen. Reassembled, they formed a six-centimetre female figurine that pushed the start date of European figurative art back by at least five thousand years.

The Venus of Hohle Fels belongs to the Aurignacian — the first archaeological signature of modern humans in Europe. The figure exaggerates breasts and hips and dispenses with a head entirely, replacing it with a carved ring that almost certainly allowed the object to be worn as a pendant. The absence of a face seems deliberate rather than a lapse: the figure was meant to be anonymous, perhaps emblematic.

The tool-work and time required to reduce mammoth ivory to such a precise object suggests that this kind of making was not an idle pursuit. Read alongside the bone flutes recovered from the same layers, the Hohle Fels finds describe an Aurignacian world in which symbolic production was central, not peripheral.

What the figurine was for remains contested — fertility charm, personal amulet, ritual implement, or something we have no category for. Today it is displayed at the Urgeschichtliches Museum in Blaubeuren, and the cave that produced it was inscribed in 2017 onto UNESCO's World Heritage list as part of the Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura.