Shipping costs only apply once when purchasing additional items.

Documentation:
The Hohler Fels karst cave is located about one kilometer east of the town center of Schelklingen in the Alb-Donau district of Baden-Württemberg in Germany. She has been since she was 19. Century one of the most important archaeological sites of the Upper Paleolithic in Central Europe. Since that time, the dialect spelling Hohlefels has also been documented, recently also in the spelling Hohle Fels (cf. paragraph name history). The cave consists of a 15 meter long corridor and the following hall. With a floor area of ​​500 m² and a volume of 6000 m³, this is one of the largest in the Swabian Jura. The entrance is 534 m above sea level. NHN in a sponge stub of the White jura , at the foot of the slope of today's Ach valley. In 2017, the cave was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the World Heritage Site Caves and Ice Age Art of the Swabian Jura. In 1830, the potter Karl Friedrich Rixinger came across the bones of cave bears while digging for clay and clay in the cave, which he sold without specifying where they were found to the Ulm district forester Friedrich von Mandelsloh, a passionate collector of paleontological finds from the Alb. In 1844, Georg Reichenbach, a cotton manufacturer in Urspring, used bat guano and other deposits from the cave as fertilizer on a larger scale. Without knowing it, Oscar Fraas had the cave clay examined by the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in 1870. As a result of the high content of weathered organic material (guano, bones), he determined a phosphate content of around 19 percent. "This is so much that the material can probably be used by fertilizer factories." An excavation by Oscar Fraas and Pastor Josef Hartmann in 1870/71 yielded the remains of cave bears, reindeer, mammoths and wild horses. In 1872, the Anthropological Society, together with the founder of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory, Rudolf Virchow, carried out an inspection of the cave on the sidelines of a conference. In the run-up to the conference, the cave was blocked with a gate and made accessible with wooden stairs and walkways. The conference participants were allowed to take home souvenirs from the finds of the excavation of 1870/1871. The remaining finds, a whole train wagon full, were taken to the Royal Natural History Cabinet in Stuttgart. Later, the Tübingen prehistorian Robert Rudolf Schmidt assigned the tools found during Oscar Fraas' excavation to the Aurignacian and Magdalenian (earlier Palaeolithic). In 1906 Schmidt examined the cave again, but without finding any archaeological layers. From 1958 to 1960 Gerlinde Matschak and Gustav Riek carried out archaeological excavations. In 1966 the cave was surveyed by Bernhard Mangold, Andreas Pöhler and Helmut Frank. From 1977 excavations were carried out by the Institute for Prehistory at the University of Tübingen under the direction of Joachim Hahn († 1997), which was financed by the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Baden-Württemberg and temporarily by the Collaborative Research Center 53 at the University of Tübingen. Since 1997, Nicholas Conard (University of Tübingen) has headed the annual excavations. A total of more than 80,000 stone tools and almost 300 pieces of jewelry have been recovered from the cave to date. The Upper Palaeolithic minor art from the Aurignacian period of the Swabian Jura is also the oldest figurative art known to mankind. In addition to the Hohle Fels, all of these carved works of art also come from the nearby Geißenklösterle, as well as from the Vogelherd Cave and the Hohlenstein in the Lone Valley. In recent years, several spectacular finds have been made in the lower Aurignacian layers of Hohle Fels, which are among the oldest works of art known to mankind: This may have a felid's head, hence the name "Lion Man" (based on the lion man from Hohlensteinstadel); 2008 in layer V (older Aurignacian) the 6 cm large "Venus vom Hohlefels" with a minimum age of 32,000 BP (corresponds to at least 35,000 cal BC), next to the Venus from the Galgenberg the oldest Venus figurine of mankind. In 2008, an almost complete flute from the radius of a griffon vulture was found in layer Va. The bone flute is 21.8 cm long and has a diameter of about 0.8 cm. The Aurignacian layer Va is dated to at least 35,000 cal BC. In 2019, a tool ("grater") was found with which color pigments were ground. It is mainly mineral colors made of red or yellow ocher and sanguine. The find is considered particularly important because wall paintings hardly play a role in German caves. In addition to the horse's head, the water bird and the Venus figure, the permanent exhibition at the Prehistoric Museum in Blaubeuren also shows the finds of the flutes from Hohlefels and Geißenklösterle. During the Würm Ice Age, Hohle Fels was a winter resting place for cave bears. In find strata of Gravettiens, the only direct evidence to date of the hunt for these animals has been found: a flint projectile tip was found stuck in the thoracic vertebra of a cave bear. The cave bear was probably shot during its hibernation in the cave. Archaeologists found characteristic cut marks on other cave bear bones from the examined sediments, which document all stages of dissection of the animal bodies. In 2005, a pebble retoucher, the "Phallus von Schelklingen", was found in the Gravettian layers of finds.
Source: Wikipedia