Lingjing Bird Figurine

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CONTENTS

• Summary
• Location and Excavation
• Lingjing Bird Figurine: Description
• Bird Features
• Dating
• Significance
• Related Articles
• References

Summary

The "Lingjing bird figurine" is a tiny carving of a standing bird, which was recovered in 2013 from an open-air site in Henan province, China.

It is dated to 11,300 BC, making it the oldest item of prehistoric sculpture in East Asia, and the world's oldest carving made from burnt animal bone.

Despite the carving being incredibly small, CT scans show that a number of different techniques were used in its manufacture.

The figurine was discovered by an international team of archaeologists, led by Dr. Zhanyang Li from Shandong University.

The Lingjing bird sculpture and all associated archaeological material are preserved at the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China.

If the carving of small figurines is - at least for the time being - the only type of prehistoric art that originated in Europe, the discovery of the Lingjing figurine raises the possibility that even older specimens may yet emerge across East Asia.

Location and Excavation

Lingjing is an open-air paleolithic site located in land-locked Henan province in east-central China, 120 kilometres south of the Yellow River. Discovered in 1965, it has been excavated annually from 2005 to 2018 under the direction of Dr. Zhanyang Li.

The investigations identified eleven distinct layers ranging in age from 116,000 BC to 2,500 BC.

• The uppermost layers (1–4) are attributed to the Mesolithic and Neolithic culture, down to the Bronze Age.
• Layer 5 spans the second half of the Upper Paleolithic, from 25,000 to 10,000 BC.
• Layers 6-9 contain no archeological remains.
• The lowest layers (10-11) were dated by optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating technology to between 116,000 and 97,000 BC.

The bird figurine was recovered from layer 5, along with a rich assemblage of stone tools (notably microcores and microblades), some pottery sherds, ostrich egg shells and charcoal fragments.

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Lingjing Bird Figurine: Description

The Lingjing bird carving depicts a tiny standing bird (length 19.2 mm, width 5.1 mm, height 12.5 mm). The subject's shape and proportions, are similar to those of Passeriformes, an avian order that embraces more than half of all known bird species.

Instead of carving the species' typical short legs, the artist incorporated a rectangular pedestal, which allows the figurine to stand upright.

An oversized tail was added by the artist to prevent the bird from tilting forward.

The wings are not represented.

The figurine was 3D scanned using a General Electrics Vtome x|s microtomography housed at Bordeaux University, in France. Microtomographic and microscopic analysis showed it was made of bone blackened by heat, and carved using four techniques:

• Gouging to shape the throat and breast.
• Abrading to smooth the right-hand side.
• Scraping to even out the base of the pedestal.
• Incising on the head, to depict the eye and the bill.

Bird Features

The archaeologists involved are certain the carving represents a bird, for four main reasons.

• Its outline, matches that of a bird almost exactly, and presents several avian features, including: tail, head, bill, throat, breast, and abdomen.
• The edges of the outline are refined to enhance the avian characteristics, like the rounded volume of the body, and conical shape of the bill.
• Extra attention was paid to the head in respect of the eye and bill.
• Technological analysis of the markings on the figurine shows they were deliberately made, and the carving techniques used were entirely appropriate to highlight the anatomical features of a bird.

Dating

In order to find out the age of the figurine, three burnt bone samples were sent to the Beta Analytic Testing Laboratory, in Miami, Florida.

Here, using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry dating methods, they obtained an estimated date range of about 11,300 BC (between 11,448 and 11,279 BC).

This means that the Lingjing bird figurine predates all similar artifacts from this region by 8,500 years.

Significance

The recent dating of the Sulawesi cave paintings shows that southeast Asia was producing figurative pictures of animals thousands of years before Europe.

Sculpture, however, is a different story.

So far, the most easterly sculptures are the Mal'ta Venuses and Buret Venuses (c.20,000 BC), found in the remote Eurasian landmass around Lake Baikal.

In East Asia, the oldest known sculptures date to Neolithic culture around 3,000 BC. Only ancient Chinese pottery offers any earlier 3-D representations.

By comparison, the European sculptural tradition dates back to the mammoth ivory figurines in the Vogelherd Cave, and the Lion Man of Hohlenstein Stadel, all created from around 38,000 BC.

These carvings were followed by the widespread production of venus figurines, during the Gravettian culture between 30,000 and 20,000 BC.

Thus, although not yet comparable with the age of European carvings, the Lingjing bird figurine shows that mobiliary art in China also included a sculptural tradition, and offers hope that - as more paleolithic sites are examined in the region - there will be older discoveries still to come.

Related Articles

• Xianren Cave Pottery
  Jiangxi Province: 18,000 BC
  The world's oldest ceramic pots.
• Yuchanyan Cave Pottery
  Hunan province: 16,300 BC
  The world's second oldest pots.

To see how the Lingjing bird carving fits into the chronology of paleolithic culture, see: Prehistoric Art Timeline.

References

"A Paleolithic bird figurine from the Lingjing site, Henan, China." Li Z, Doyon L, Fang H, Ledevin R, Queffelec A, Raguin E, et al. (2020) PLoS ONE 15(6): e0233370.