Ulli Lust, born in Vienna in 1967, is an award-winning comic artist and illustrator. The German edition of this book, published in 2025, won that year’s €25,000 German Nonfiction Prize, awarded by Germany’s publishers and booksellers association—the first time a graphic-format book was awarded the prize.The original edition of Early Man Was a Woman, Book 2 (forthcoming from The Experiment) was awarded the 2026 Max Und Moritz Award for Best Non-fiction Comic, the most important award for graphic literature in German-speaking countries. Her graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life garnered international acclaim and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Ignatz Award. Her subsequent books include How I Tried to Be a Good Person and Voices in the Dark, based on the novel by Marcel Beyer. She teaches drawing and comics at the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
Q: Your comic begins with a digression on the portrayal of women in early human history and their assessment, particularly in fields like science and academia. Just as these fields were dominated by men, depictions of early humans are dominated by female figures. How does this challenge our previous ideas about this period?
Ulli Lust: The significant female presence in the art of so-called prehistory is unusual, to say the least. “History” usually refers to the last 6,000 years since the invention of writing. Everything before that is prehistory. About 7,000 years ago, images began to increasingly show depictions of violence, and at some point, images of men replaced the many female statuettes that were commonly found in Neolithic excavations. The imagery of the Ice Age and the Neolithic period differs in many ways from that of later periods, and this makes it exciting to study. There are certain signs and symbolic images that recur and have been passed down through many cultures, laying a trail back to the difficult search for traces in a very distant past.
Q: The media and popular literature on this period have always shown men as the hunters, providers, and even the artists during the prehistoric ages. Is that portrayal changing?
UL: Today, we are accustomed to a strong male drive for self-expression and assume that this must have always been the case. But in images from the Ice Age, men played a rather marginal role—for around 20,000 years. Most depictions of Ice Age mammoth hunters show women. Nevertheless, many texts on the Stone Age focus mainly on men, depicting them hunting, striking flint, and creating art. Fortunately, this stereotype has begun to change in recent years. Suddenly, the women of the Ice Age are coming into focus.
Q: You illustrate daily life for these prehistoric societies with such detail and scale throughout your book. What were these women doing each day?
UL: Today, we know: Probably the same things as men. Traditional hunter-gatherers are usually universalists, which means that everyone had to be able to do everything necessary for survival. This also includes hunting. Female skeletons from the Ice Age have been found to have traces of well-developed shoulder muscles, specifically those muscles that are trained when throwing.
The Stone Age is no longer a valid example of the natural male superiority that is still cited in some areas, to which weak women willingly submitted because otherwise they would have starved. After all, archaeological grave finds from the Ice Age show no evidence of a gender hierarchy.
Q: How did you approach the magnitude of research required for this book? Did you face any challenges in balancing scientific accuracy and artistic freedom?
UL: In the end, most of the actual research consisted of reading detailed excavation reports and specialist publications. Whenever possible, I visited original sites and museums; as a documentary comic artist, I have developed a toolbox over the years that I was able to use to its full extent for this topic.
Compared to nonfiction authors, who describe things in text and then must rely on the imaginations of their readers, the medium of visual storytelling offers several advantages. The parallel use of images and text makes it especially easy to empathize with the living environments of the Paleolithic era. After all, our own living environments are conceivably far removed from those of traditionally living nomadic hunters and gatherers.
Q: You emphasize the role of empathy and community in the survival of early humanity. Do you see parallels with the challenges we face as a society today?
UL: There are many myths about ourselves: For example, that we are selfish by nature and only capable of social behavior through the practices of education, culture, or religion. Instances of daily life in the Stone Age are often used to describe “our nature,” that is, our fundamental character and drive. Until recently, old textbooks on evolutionary history devoted a great deal of space to the topics of aggression and competition, and the question was raised as to how the ability to trust others, even complete strangers, could have evolved in an aggressive, hostile, competitive environment.
In his 2017 book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky says, “The willingness of hunters and gatherers to cooperate—the social cornerstone of 99 percent of hominin history—is based at least as much on reciprocal altruism between non-relatives as it is on kin selection.” One of the new perspectives on early history I mention is the observation that supposedly “soft” skills, such as empathy and willingness to share, are highly unusual in the animal kingdom. These skills were able to develop because they were useful for our survival—and they remain essential today.
Early Man Was a Woman is out September 1st. Preorder a copy everywhere books are sold.
