Claim
Do You Know? BHAGWAN NARASIMHA SCULPTURE FOUND IN GERMANY. IT IS DETERMINED BY CARBON DATING THAT IT IS 35,000 TO 40,000 YEARS OLD WE CAN THINK BY THIS HOW VAST OUR CULTURE WAS SPREAD BEFORE HISTORY WAS DISTORTED. #dharmainspiration
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Explanation
According to Hindu mythology, Narasimha is one of the avatars of a Hindu deity Vishnu. As per the mythology, Narasimha avatar has a part-lion, part-human form of body incarnated to kill Hiranyakashipu. In social media, several posts about a 40,000-year-old Narasimha statue found in Germany is being shared virally.
This particular claim had been around at least since 2016 and had been shared from time to time. This is mostly shared by the right wing supporters from time to time even though it had been fact-checked by YouTurn and many other independent fact-checkers multiple times. Some of the posts can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Right wing website Postcard also published an article about with the same claim in 2017.
What’s the truth?
This statue is called a Lion-Man statue which was discovered by Otto Völzing in 1939 in the Hohlenstein-Stadel of Germany. The Lion-Man statue is called Löwenmensch in German which means lion-person and that is where the statue got its name from. This ivory statue is made by carving out a Mammoth’s tusk and it is carbon dated to be around 30,000 years old. According to the widely respected news journal Nature, Lion-man statue is the oldest statue ever to be found.
This is one of the most important statues found from the Upper Paleolithic age (40,000-10,000 BC) along with the statue of the Venus of Willendorf.
According to the ‘The British Museum’, “It is impossible to know what that story was about or whether he was deity, an avatar to the spirit world, part of a creation story or a human whose experiences on a journey through the cosmos to communicate with spirits caused this transformation.” The Museum also claims that Lion Man is the oldest known evidence for religious beliefs and Stadel Cave suggests that believing and belonging have a deep history crucial to human societies and originating long before writing.
Though this statue of a lion-man resembles the Narasimha avatar which also is made of part-lion and part-human form, this is not a Narasimha statue. We have fact-checked this back in 2020 in Tamil but this fake news continues to spread even to this day.
Conclusion
The statue is not a Narasimha statue. This is a lion-man statue and it was discovered in 1939. The viral claim is fake that is being spread for at least more than 6 years.
