In his latest book “Half-Man Half-Beast” (Les éditions du Cerf, 2025), philosopher Philippe Grosos gives them a scholarly name, theranthrope, from the Greek “therion” (wild animal) and “anthropos” (human), and traces them back to their furthest source. This source is not in Europe or the Mediterranean basin, but on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, where a rock painting dating back at least 50,200 years depicts eight small bipeds with reptile or bird heads facing a dwarf bovid. This is the oldest known representation of theranthropes and predates by ten millennia the first decorated caves in Europe.
On the European continent, the oldest known depiction is also theranthropic. The Löwenmensch, the lion-man from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Swabian Jura, Germany, is a mammoth ivory statuette standing at 31 centimeters tall, dating back around 40,000 years. Unearthed in 1939 in about 200 fragments, one week before the declaration of war, it was only fully reconstructed in 2012. It reveals a stunning technical mastery (lion ears carved precisely, navel worked by rotation, seven symbolic notches on the left arm whose meaning remains undecipherable). In the Chauvet cave, in Ardèche, an even stranger figure awaits the visitor at the back of the cavern: a female biped with thighs extended by two animal heads, a lion and a bison, depicted on a rocky outcrop. These works are not isolated curiosities. They testify to a coherent logic that Grosos calls the “logic of hybridization”: for Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, the boundaries between species were fluid, and humans saw themselves as living among the living, without claiming to occupy the center of the world.
With neolithization, the long process that gradually transforms hunter-gatherer societies into agro-pastoralists from the ninth millennium BCE, theranthropes do not disappear. They multiply and radically change their appearance. In central Sahara, anthropologist and prehistorian Jean-Loïc Le Quellec has identified more than 400, produced between 4,500 and 2,500 years BCE: these figures are now dressed, armed, and sometimes depicted lifting aurochs with bare hands. In southern Africa, the San confer a cosmogonic dimension to them, linked to the myth of an original unity between humans and beasts.
In Egypt, Anubis, Thoth, Sekhmet, Horus, and the Sphinx make theranthropes the pillars of a pantheon in the service of dynastic power. This shift is, for Philippe Grosos, much more than a stylistic evolution: it is a sign of an ontological revolution. Where Paleolithic people inhabited the world in a “participatory” manner, seeing themselves as participants in the flow of life, Neolithic societies inhabit it in an “essential” way: humans become the organizing center of all representations, and with them emerge questions of ancestry, filiation, and the legitimization of power.
The question raised by Philippe Groso’s book goes far beyond prehistory. Contemporary medicine performs xenografts (organ transplantations from animals to humans, from pig heart valves to pig kidney grafts) and laboratories create animal-human chimeras for therapeutic purposes. Do they suffice to make us modern theranthropes? No, Philippe Grosos responds: biological or technological hybridization is a necessary but not sufficient condition for theranthropy. This requires a mythological representation, a fantasized figuration aimed at fixing a symbolic or social order. What ultimately reveals this long philosophical and archaeological investigation is that the deepest difference in human history is not the invention of writing, but this earlier silent shift by which humans placed themselves at the center of the world. Theranthropes, from Sulawesi to the pyramids, are the most eloquent witnesses to this. For more information: “Half-Man Half-Beast, A Brief Phenomenology of Theranthropes, from Paleolithic to Egyptians”, Les éditions du Cerf, October 2025.
