I was listening to something the other day and there was a mention of the Lion Man of Hohlenstein Stadel. It is a piece of Paleolithic art, the oldest known to exist, from an area of the Swiss Alps where a lot of Aurignacian artifacts have been found. Carbon dating puts it at 32,000 years old, give or take. If you take a close look at the pics in the link, you will see it is sort of a half cat and half man thing. The remarkable thing about it is the detail. The “caveman” who created that thing was highly skilled. It is carved from a mammoth tusk and was carved with a flint knife, most likely.

That bit of art tells us a great deal about the people who created it. They had time to have at least one guy make art. They possessed the ability to imagine things that did not exist. That assumes there were no lion-men running around Europe at the time. Maybe the ancient aliens who gave humans civilization looked like lion-human hybrids, but that’s not the current theory. Instead, the level of sophistication in this piece as well as others suggests a high degree of cognitive ability and a sophisticated culture, one with religion and abstract reasoning. It means Aurignacian were modern humans.

That’s all important stuff. Well, it is important to sensible people interested in the origins of humanity. To social justice warriors, it is secondary to the fight against the pale penis people. In refreshing my memory of the artifact, I found this story about how Euro-nags are demanding the statue be called “Höhlenlöwin” (female European cave lion). The sex of the item could be useful, but without context it is meaningless anyway so there’s no point in debating, unless you are a crazed feminist determined to make a nuisance of yourself.

The only the reason to post about this is I think this stuff is cool and to underscore a point. These nuts that turn up from time to time in the media screeching about some made up crisis are not harmless. Imagine a plague of rage zombies running wild through the streets. They may be small in number and easy to pick off one at a time, but they still cause a lot of damage. That’s what we have in our intellectual space. Feminists, communists, anarchists and every other imaginable type of lunatic is running around wreaking havoc on public debate and intellectual discourse.

There’s a cost to it beyond the direct damage. Smart people with controversial ideas are less inclined to step forward when they know some nutter could pop up and ruin their career and life. An example is the Rape Hoax at the University of Virginia I wrote about the other day. The pajama boys at National Review are now jumping in on the act, borrowing heavily from Steve Sailer, who gets zero mention from the respectable chattering skulls, even though he seems to function as their spirit guide. As Steve pointed out, supposedly sensible people were too timid to point out the warning signals that the whole thing may be fiction.

Only after some fringe weirdos made the case did the cautious dip their toe in the water.