Raiders of the Lost Past with Janina Ramirez

Summer 1939.

A golden age of exploration and archaeology is coming to an end.

It was an era that saw adventurers set out to explore the remotest

corners of the globe

in search of clues to unlock our ancients past.

And it was during that last summer of peace, as the world stood on the

precipice of a war that threatened to end civilisation itself,

that three extraordinary treasures were discovered -

treasures that would radically change our understanding

of the origins and diversity of human culture...

That made this stone the oldest datable artwork ever found

in the Americas.

And bring us closer to our distant past.

You scared me!

In this series, I'll be on the trail of a cast of remarkable

archaeologists, each a product of their era.

From a self-taught amateur...

Everybody's pressuring him to get to the treasure.

To a pair of charismatic adventurers...

We have come upon the hiding place of a unique group of early

American heroic sculpture.

And an academic driven by a dark political agenda.

But here, in writing, he's acknowledging this figure.

Their fascinating tales of intuition, eccentricity, and luck...

I can't believe it. Another lost colossal head.

Each show how archaeology was enlisted into the promotion

of very different world views,

and yet each is a powerful reminder of our shared humanity.

To me, it is just an astonishing work of art.

In this episode, I've come to the caves of southern Germany,

where, just a week before hostilities began,

an Ice Age treasure from our distant past emerged from the gloom.

This half human, half animal

represents a revolution in the human story.

It's the very first work of our imagination that marks

the beginnings of art and religion.

And yet it could have easily slipped through our fingers,

because the story of its discovery and reconstruction

is nothing short of extraordinary -

and it begins during one of the darkest chapters

in our recent history.

On 25 August, 1939,

in a dark and dank cave in southern Germany,

a discovery is made.

On the very last day of a three-year-long excavation,

in search of treasures from the Ice Age, several fragments of

mammoth ivory, that appear to have been shaped by human hands,

are pulled from the ground.

The fragments are hastily packed into a cigar box

and the trench is back-filled.

The find is reported to the director of the dig,

a key figure in Nazi Germany's shadowy state archaeology unit,

an ambitious academic called Robert Wetzel.

A week later, war is declared.

Nazi Germany invades Poland.

And the discovery is seemingly forgotten...

because, in what must be one of the greatest mysteries of archaeology,

Robert Wetzel never again mentioned what was found that day.

What they didn't realise at the time was that they had discovered perhaps

the singlemost important piece of Ice Age art that we know of.

One of the first great masterpieces of human history.

And this is what they'd found.

Carved from a single piece of mammoth ivory,

this half human, half animal is a modest work of art by modern

standards, but it marks a revolution in the human story,

pushing back our understanding of the beginnings of culture

and belief by thousands of years.

And its discovery in our own age,

this traveller from deep in our past,

is almost as extraordinary as the object itself.

Because the Lion-man wasn't pulled out off the ground on that day

in 1939 looking like this.

What we see today is the result of not just one,

but numerous chance discoveries across eight decades,

discoveries that, at times, seem to defy belief.

The story of the Lion-man can tell us so much about the origins

of art and religion,

but it's also a window onto a troubled period

in the history of archaeology.

Robert Wetzel was, in many ways, a pioneering archaeologist,

but why did he also believe that the discovery of Ice Age artefacts

could somehow support the ideology of Nazi Germany?

And why, after the war, did he never follow up on what would

have been a career-defining find?

The discovery of a half lion, half man that today remains

the oldest known representational work of art in human history.

60,000 years ago, the glaciers covering northern Europe

began to retreat

and, as the ice loosened its grip, small groups of Homo sapiens

ventured into these lands for the very first time.

They moved through a corridor, along the Danube River,

in what is today southern Germany.

Just to the north of the Danube is a mountainous area called

the Swabian Jura

and it was here that these first bands of Homo sapiens settled

for a while in the caves that line the valleys

of the Ach and Lone Rivers.

I've come to one of those caves

to see where those first pioneers would have sheltered.

It's hard to overemphasise the importance of these caves

and of the objects that were unearthed here.

For 100,000 years or more, Homo sapiens had gradually

been moving out of Africa, across Asia and Australasia.

But it's here, in a small corner of southern Germany,

that modern humans, our ancestors, first seemed to flicker into life.

Archaeologists have known that there's something special about

these caves since the middle of the 19th century.

In the 1860s, palaeontologist Oskar Fraas was one of the first

to prove the co-existence of Ice Age animals and humans.

And in the caves of the Swabian Jura, he discovered numerous

stone tools and jewellery.

But it wasn't until the early 1930s that the true importance

of the region was established

because it was here, at a cave called Vogelherd in the Lone Valley,

that the very first Ice Age artworks from the Swabian Jura

were discovered -

not by Robert Wetzel, but by his great rival, Gustav Riek.

In 1931, Gustav Riek thought this would be a good cave to excavate

because a badger had pulled a prehistoric artefact out

through a crack in the ground.

Inside here, however, there were layers of sediments that reached

right up to the ceiling.

In a sort of smash-and-grab archaeology, his team cleared this

space and what they would find would redraw

our understanding of human creativity.

Found just eight years before the discovery of the Lion-man,

this is one of the many treasures uncovered by Gustav Riek

in the Vogelherd cave.

This is, quite simply, the first known depiction of a horse

in human history.

This jewel-like sculpture isn't just breathtakingly beautiful -

it also displays the creative skill of its maker

because, although it's lost its legs, the modelling of the muscles

indicate this is a horse in motion.

It's got this inherent energy and dynamism to it.

Then there's the minutely-worked details, the backward pointing ears,

the nostrils and mouth.

Even individual hairs carved in on the mane that runs right across

the top of the head.

It really does feel to me like it could just bolt out of the case.

This tiny horse is a revelation to me.

It rivals the great equestrian statues of ancient Greece and Rome

and yet it's among our first attempts

to try and capture the world around us.

It revolutionises our understanding of the development of art.

We're used to thinking about a sort of evolution from simple,

primitive art, through to the naturalism of the classical world,

and onto the beauty of the Renaissance -

but this horse turns all that on its head

because it seems that we were brilliant artists

from the very beginning.

And Gustav Riek pulled yet more stunning artworks

from the Vogelherd cave.

There are exquisitely-carved mammoths...

and powerful, muscular lions.

An array of tiny masterpieces reaching us from deep in our past.

Riek dated these sculptures to around 30,000 years ago,

which at the time made them the oldest artworks discovered

anywhere in the world.

But these extraordinary miniature sculptures from the Vogelherd cave

were soon swept up by the extremist ideology of 1930s Germany.

In 1933, just two years after the Vogelherd discoveries,

Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party took power in Germany.

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and architect of the Holocaust,

was obsessed by Germany's prehistoric past.

He believed that the Nordic Aryan peoples, whom he saw as the

original inhabits of Germany, were superior to all other races -

so much so that he believed that all human culture originated

in Ice Age Germany.

These ideas laid the foundation for the murder of millions of Jews

and many others in the Nazi death camps.

In 1935, Himmler formed a special unit of the SS

called the Ahnenerbe - meaning "ancestry" -

devoted to establishing the origins of the German people through the

study of ancient texts, folklore and, crucially, archaeology.

They sent explorers across the world, even as far as Tibet,

to establish the eventual spread of the Aryan race.

But to prove that modern German were directly descended from Ice Age

hunters, Himmler needed evidence -

the kind of evidence that was emerging from recent excavations

in the caves of the Swabian Jura.

And so, under the banner of the SS, Himmler's Ahnenerbe began funding

digs all over Germany.

It was an opportunity enthusiastically taken up

by archaeologists like Gustav Riek and the man that would become his

greatest rival - Robert Wetzel.

Gustav Riek's excavations caused great excitement, but also a certain

amount of jealousy among fellow archaeologists.

Wetzel began his own excavations in 1932 in the Lone Valley.

Amazingly, some of his diaries survive.

So, it gives us this remarkable glimpse back into a past world.

There are photographs showing Wetzel himself on a hot day outside

a dig and members of his team.

All the way through, there are diagrams, careful drawings that show

what he excavated, and on what levels he found certain

objects and artefacts.

In contrast to Riek's hurried excavations of the Vogelherd,

Wetzel adopted a far more systematic approach,

well in advance of his time -

excavating in metre strips, while making careful drawings