Löwenmensch
About 30,000 years before anyone thought to plant a seed instead of chase an animal, someone sat in a cave — probably by firelight — and spent weeks carving something that has never existed and could never exist: a being with the legs of a human and the head and torso of a lion. This is the Lion Man, found in a cave in what is now Germany, roughly 40,000 years old. To carve it required flint tools and an estimated 400 hours of work. That's not an afternoon's distraction. That's a commitment — a devotion, even. Which means the community around this person had to support them, had to believe that making this impossible thing was worth the time, worth the food it took to keep the carver alive while they worked. Whatever this figure meant, it mattered enough to organize life around it. To obviously hard to miss but on second thought astonishing fact is the ability for this first person to imagine a lion with human body. They had to reach across the boundary between two categories of reality and fuse them into a third thing that transcends both. That is not a small act. That is the first evidence we have of a human mind doing what mystics have always done: perceiving and projecting a reality behind and beyond the visible one.
