A bird carved from mammoth ivory, 1.3 grams

Make an object plate: one object, held still, with leader lines running out to labels, every part of it earning its label. One still image, 1:1 square, briefed for a GPT Image 2 class model, whose real ratio list is 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2 and 2:3. The discipline of this family is that the object is the whole picture and the labels are quiet servants of it, so no scene, no story, no diorama. FACT (locked, build on it, do not re-research): archaeologists from the University of Tuebingen recovered two bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory at Hohle Fels cave in the Swabian Jura in southwestern Germany, a UNESCO World Heritage area. The figurines are about 40,000 years old. They were found in 2025, in the same layer, lying about 1.5 metres apart. One weighs 1.3 grams, the other weighs 0.7 grams. Both are less than an inch long, about the size of a thumbnail, and they are the smallest sculptures found so far at this site. One is the more complete of the two and may show a resting or brooding bird. THERE IS NO NEST in the object and none should be drawn. The other is incomplete, with part of it broken away; it shows a bird with its wings out. Do not restore what is missing and do not state what it is doing. They come from the Aurignacian layers at Hohle Fels, which have produced some of the oldest figurative art known, and date to the arrival of modern humans in the Upper Danube region. Nicholas Conard of the University of Tuebingen, scientific director of the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art, described them as the smallest and most delicate representations of this period. The find was announced to the press at the end of July 2026. Use these figures exactly and leave out any figure we have not locked. SCOPE, and hold it. What each bird depicts is an interpretation and not a fact, so if you say brooding, or flying, use may or possibly, or say nothing. The claim is the smallest found so far AT THIS CAVE, not the smallest carving ever made anywhere, and not the oldest art in the world. Do not name a bird species. Do not invent a carver, an age, a sex, a purpose, a ritual or a tool mark you have not been told about. Do not derive any new number from the two weights, including a ratio or a total. Do not render any institutional crest, logo, seal or wordmark, and do not print any named researcher's name or likeness on the piece. GROUND (decide this, do not let the model default): a real human hand, photographed close. Skin fills the frame and is the only ground there is, warm and living, every pore and print line and crease visible, the figurine resting on it. Keep at least one unmistakable human landmark in shot, a fingertip edge, a nail, a knuckle crease, so it reads as a hand and not as pink texture, and so the scale lands without a caption. This is the whole idea of the piece, so commit to it. White, pale grey and navy are the defaults this brief FAILS on, and so is the black museum backdrop with a spotlit artefact, the white catalogue page, and the coin laid alongside for scale, which is the tired cliche of this exact subject. A printed scale bar is not a substitute for a body. LIGHT: hard and raking, low from one side, so the carved incisions read as shadow rather than as line, and so the skin has real texture. DISTANCE: extreme macro. The figurine appears LARGER in the frame than it is in life, and the hand around it is what tells you it is not. That contradiction is the picture. FLOOR (hard, this is the material standard): made with a real frontier image model, GPT Image 2 class or better. Flat vector, hand drawn SVG or HTML, and screenshot collage all FAIL. Stock, archive and library imagery FAILS. Text belongs to the artwork: type shares the piece's light, grain and material and reads as printed with it, never bolted on after. Submit your files individually; zipped or otherwise archived submissions will not be considered. CRAFT STANDARD (read all of it before you start). Composition: one clear focal a stranger finds in under 3 seconds, then a second layer that rewards a longer look. Legibility: this is judged first as a thumbnail on a phone, so the headline must survive at that size, and any label too small to read there should not exist. Palette: pick 2 or 3 inks and hold them. A piece with 8 colours reads as a template. Labelling: every label points at something real in the image, no floating decoration. Finish: real material behaviour carried consistently across the whole frame, including the type. DIRECTION is yours. FOCAL: the size, felt before it is read. A stranger has to feel that this thing is impossibly small and impossibly old at the same moment, and feel it from the object and the hand, before a single number reaches them. YOUR CALL: whether you show one figurine or both, whether the hand is open flat or the object sits between finger and thumb, and which details earn the leader lines. Also yours: whether the ivory reads as fresh cream or as the deep patina of 40,000 years in a cave. Both are defensible, pick one and hold it. SURPRISE ME: the obvious take caps your score, the boldest true take wins. The obvious take is a museum object photographed on black with a caption. JUDGED on wow, then subject, surprise, taste, craft, material. A plate where a stranger physically flinches at the scale beats a prettier plate where they do not. NOT THIS: no cave painting backdrop, no fur-clad hunter, no mammoth in the background, no torchlight cave scene, no ape-to-man progress line, no Indiana Jones styling, no glowing artefact, no museum vitrine, no gloved curator's hand in a white cotton glove, which is a stock image and kills the intimacy. No modern jewellery styling. TEXT BUDGET: one headline that states the takeaway and names the subject, plus up to 5 small labels, only if they stay legible at phone size. NOTHING ABOUT HOW THE PIECE WAS MADE GOES ON THE PIECE: no process notes, no verification lines, no model or tool credit, no house credit, no timing or deadline text. Do not render this brief's section labels (FACT, SCOPE, FLOOR, GROUND, FOCAL, NOT THIS and the rest) or the NOT THIS list as type on the piece. Credit your model in the submission text instead. DELIVER: one finished hero image at 1:1, plus concept-note.md and sources.md. The IMAGE itself must be self contained, with no URLs, QR codes or watermarks rendered on it; put your source links in sources.md. Name your model in the submission text.