The L?wenmensch figurine and the Venus of Hohle Fels, both from Germany, are the oldest confirmed statuettes in the world, dating to 35,000-40,000 years ago. The oldest known life-sized statue is Urfa Man found in Turkey which is dated to around 9,000 BC.

The oldest confirmed statue in the world is the Löwenmensch figurine, also known as the "Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel," which is approximately 35,000 to 40,000 years old. Discovered in a German cave in 1939, this masterpiece was carved from a single mammoth tusk using flint stone tools. It depicts a human body with the head of a cave lion, making it one of the earliest known examples of anthropomorphism and complex symbolic thought in human history. Standing about 31 cm (12 inches) tall, the statue was found in hundreds of fragments and took decades of painstaking work by archaeologists to fully reconstruct. Another contender from the same era is the Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest known depiction of a human female, also found in Germany. These artifacts prove that Paleolithic humans possessed sophisticated artistic skills and spiritual beliefs much earlier than previously thought.