Nicholas Conard

Nicholas Conard at the University of Tübingen Museum (2013)

Nicholas J. Conard, (born July 23, 1961 in Cincinnati) is an American archaeologist and prehistorian. He is the director of the department for early prehistory and quaternary ecology and the founding director of the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Conard is the project leader of a team working on an archaeological examination of the Hohle Fels cave in the Swabian Jura area, a low mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, bounded by the Danube in the southeast and the upper Neckar in the northwest. This is near where the Löwenmensch figurine, (meaning "lion-human") was found in 1939, forgotten due to the war, and only reëxamined following a 1997 discovery of additional parts of the figurine. Conard's team has been exploring the Hohe Fels site for approximately twenty years. Recently they uncovered more fragments of human female figurines that date to the Aurignacian, an Upper Paleolithic culture, confirming dates exceeded only by the Löwenmensch figurine and that such female figurines are more widely distributed than thought previously.

Honors and awards

• Order of Merit of Baden-Württemberg
• Member of the Heidelberg Academy for Sciences and Humanities

Selected articles

• Riehl, S., M. Zeidi, and N. J. Conard. 2013. Emergence of Agriculture in the Foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Science. 341: 65-67.
• Conard, N. J., M. Malina, and S. C. Münzel. 2009. New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany. Nature 460: 737-740.
• Conard, N. J. 2009. A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany. Nature 459: 248-252.
• Conard, N. J., P. M. Grootes, and F. H. Smith. 2004. Unexpectedly recent dates for human remains from Vogelherd. Nature 430: 198-201.
• Conard, N. J. 2003. Paleolithic ivory sculptures from southwestern Germany and the origins of figurative art. Nature 426: 830-832.
• Conard, N. J., D. L. Asch, N. B. Asch, D. Elmore, H. E. Gove, M. Rubin, J. A. Brown, M. D. Wiant, K. B. Farnsworth, and T. G. Cook. 1983. Prehistoric Horticulture in Illinois: Accelerator Radiocarbon Dating of the Evidence. University of Rochester Nuclear Structure Research Laboratory Report 57.

External links

• http://www.geo.uni-tuebingen.de/en/work-groups/prehistory-archaeological-sciences/institut/early-prehistory-and-quaternary-ecology.html