As Close As You'll Get To Holding a 35,000 Year Old Lion-Man Figurine

I've just been checking out one of the oldest pieces of sculpture made by humans. The Smithsonian Institution has set up a major web site on human evolution. There's lots of stuff worth exploring on the site, although there are still some bugs and some of the stuff is unnecessarily obscure for a site intended for us non-paleoanthropologists. I'm particularly fond at the moment of the 3-D scans of ancient artifacts that you can rotate around on your computer. Check out the lion-man, for starters.

[Image: Wikipedia]