Rather belatedly watching an amazing documentary on the 40,000 year old Lion-Man statue made from Ivory and found in a German cave by SS Archaeologists.
Just a hint: SS was a military group, not the entirety of German population and not even the entire military (Wehrmacht) in that time. The SS certainly didn't have archeologists. It's like saying some Americans of today are "TSA archeologists".
The BBC calls it Nazi archeologists which is still not really correct or fair. The Nazis were a political party, not everyone adhered to it's views. The archeologists might well have been on the other side of the political spectrum but had not much chance to change country. It's like calling all Americans today Trump cashiers, Trump archeologists or Trump teachers. Doesn't make sense.
Except they did. The project that led to the Lion Man was started by paleontologist Robert Wetzel who joined the SS in 1937 and later became Sturmbannführer.
Völzing's excavation was funded by the SS which was not something that you happened to be roped into without your knowledge.
No, the SS did in fact have academics in their ranks to produce things that link the SS/Nazism to the "German past," to scientifically show the "superiority" of the German people, and to "quantify" how exactly everyone else was less human than the German "Aryan" peoples.
The SS was much more than a military group. It was a weird mix of paramilitary organization, police force, academy of sciences, academy of arts, men's club, cult, and think tank.
“The lion-headed figurine is the oldest-known zoomorphic (animal-shaped) sculpture in the world, and the oldest-known uncontested example of figurative art. It has been determined by carbon dating of the layer in which it was found to be between 35,000 and 40,000 years old, and therefore is associated with the archaeological Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic. It was carved out of mammoth ivory using a flint stone knife.”
We are interviewing Dr. Joan Baker, a curator of Paleoprogramming Institute, about the recently discovered trove of ancient project management documents.
Dr. Baker, in your opinion, why would a primitive community, mainly concerned with building computer applications almost entirely by hand and under the constant threat of global warming, allow somebody to spend so much time detailing what exactly work will be done, when it will be done, and then also detailing how many hours it actually took?
We can only speculate, but we believe it is a relationship to things unseen, the vital forces of nature, that you need to perhaps propitiate, perhaps connect to, in order to ensure your successful life.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008c5c