Raiders of the Lost Past with Janina Ramirez

In this intriguing series, historian Janina Ramirez rewinds to 1939 when archaeologist Robert Wetzel discovered an Ice Age sculpture in the caves of southern Germany just days before the outbreak of the Second World War. Known as Lion Man, it is a halfhuman, half-animal figurine carved from one piece of mammoth ivory. Ramirez highlights the artefact’s significance as the oldest work of representational art in human history and also explains how the initially sidelined piece was gradually re-constructed across eight decades. TD