Old Suebian Things

Suebia First ¹⁾

I can't resist the temptation to claim that we Suebians were always ahead of the crowd.

Present-day hard-core Suebians live in the southwest corner of Germany, roughly in the area marked by the red ellipse. The artifacts shown below were in caves of the "Schwäbische Alb", (in particular the "Vogelherdhöhle") about in the area marked by the circle.


Suebia within the State of Baden-Württemberg

What do we have:

The world's first artists making sculptures.
The mammoth and the horse below were carved form ivory about 33.000 years ago. They are thus the oldest sculptures found so far.


Ivory Mammoth

Then we have the world's first musicians. The picture shows the oldest musical instrument fashioned by human hands known to date. It is a delicate flute made from the wing bone of a vulture that made its last flight about 35,000 years ago.
In the cave were the flute was found, a few more flute fragments were found plus the "Venus" shown below.


Vulture Bone Flute


Ivory Horse

The Lion Man shown below is among the greatest treasures recovered from the early Suebians. It is another ivory carving showing a lion-headed figure. It is recognized as the oldest known anthropomorphic animal carving in the world. While Mammoths did roam the area 30.000 years ago, I'm not so sure about lions proper. But some big cats did run around then.
We may conclude that my forebears either smoked or chewed some strong stuff, had mastered the art of making alcohol, or had invented some kind of religion. Why else would you produce a figure of a men with a lion's head? Whatever - it's a "first".


Ivory Lion man

Finally, Suebians were the world's first philosophers, psychologists or MCP's. The "Venus" below is 40.000 years old and demonstrates convincingly that the old Suebians's had mastered the concept of the feminine principle from either a philosophical, psychological, or Playboy point of view


Oldest "Venus" Figurine (Ivory) You can find most of the others too - somewhere in the hyperscript.

The various caves and their contents have now (July 2017) proclaimed to be a World Heritage Site by the UN. This means no more poking around in there without first fighting major bureaucratic red tape. Probably a good thing.

So it comes as no surprise that a little later (1879) Albert Einstein was born in Ulm (white circle on the map up there) and that the first car of the world, constructed by Carl Benz, was roaming the general area in 1888.
Yes, Einstein was a Suebian! If you don't believe this, listen to his accent when he speaks English (easy to find in the Net) and and compare it to mine or any other Suebian who tries to speak English.

The first car driver, however, was not Carl Benz, the inventor of the motor car, but his wife Bertha Benz. She took the car out for a spin on August 5, 1888, without telling her husband, and without permission of the authorities. She probably needed to do some urgent shopping.
Just kidding. Bertha, born in 1849, wanted to prove to her husband - a proper engineer who had failed to consider marketing his invention adequately - that the automobile they both heavily invested in, would become a financial success once it was shown to be useful to the general public. Turns out she was right. She drove 106 km in one day, something hardly possible with horses.


Berta around 1871. A nice suebian girl.


"Patent-Motorwagen Nr. 1" from Carl Benz.

¹⁾

On Nov. 8th, 2017, I had a major operations (essentially I was reformatted to a cephalopod by putting a part of my fibula or calf bone in my mouth to replace parts of my upper jawbone that I lost due to some cysts. Between two narcoses deep at night, when I was more or less still not on my best, my wife told me that some guy named Trump had won the presidential election. When she came again the next day, I told her that I had had an unbelievably scary nightmare: some guy named Trump had won the presidential election!
Well! I would have preferred a scary nightmare. To put that guy in his place, I augmented the title of this module.

With frame