Four Views of A 35,000 Year Old Sexually Explicit Statuette Found in a German CaveA sculpted piece of "6-centimeter long" ivory in the shape of a voluptuous female "with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitals" has been found last "September in... the Hohle Fels ...cave in southwestern Germany, near Ulm and the Danube headwaters" by Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the German University of Tübingen.
Archeologist Conard said of the artistically designed exagerated carving, referred to as the "Hohle Fels Venus" (named after the cave of the same name it was found in) that is at least 35,000 years old and was carved from mammoth ivory is “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” ever found. The true importance of the finding is that it drastically reshapes perceptions of Paleolithic art.
According to a summary in the scientific journal Nature: "Discovery of the sexually explicit figurine of a woman, dating to 35,000 years ago, provides striking evidence of the symbolic explosion that occurred in the earliest populations of Homo sapiens in Europe."
Hohle Fels Venus
Hohle Fels Venus (side View)
Willendorf Venus
Discovered in Willendorf, Germany in 1908, the Willendorf figurine provides the archetypal example of the Venus -type carvings. It is estimated to be approximately 28,000 years old.
Blanchard Phallus
Perhaps representative of 'girls toys,' not all Paleolithic carvings were devoted to the female form as this 36,000 year old object found in France demonstrates.
Hohle Fels figurine
This earlier find from the Hohle Fels Cave, thought to be around 30,000 years old, was described by Conard in Nature in 2003. He reported the discovery of this therianthropic (half-animal/half-human) figurine along with the oldest known representation of a bird and an animal that most closely resembles a horse.
As quoted in Nature: "Conard says the discovery should radically change our thinking about Paleolithic art... Previous sculptures from the Aurignacian culture found in Swabia have focused on animals or half-animal/half-human figures, with no female figures. The Hohle Fels Venus predates the famous Gravettian Venuses by more than 5,000 years, blowing apart suggestions that it was that era that developed three-dimensional female idols."
"The pieces of the Swabian figurine "were recovered in association with characteristic stone, bone and ivory tools belonging to a period, the Aurignacian, that represents the earliest settlement of Europe by fully anatomically and genetically modern human populations, and which saw the simultaneous demise of the preceding Neanderthals", says Paul Mellars, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK.
"And the figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman," he says, "with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs) that by twenty-first-century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic."
"Mellars adds that while symbolic expressions have been found in Africa dating back to at least 75,000 years ago, attempts to represent reality with 'figurative art' currently appears to be an exclusively European phenomenon."
"The discovery, Dr. Conard wrote, “radically changes our view of the origins of Paleolithic art.” Before this, he noted, female imagery was unknown, most carvings and cave drawings being of mammoths, horses and other animals.
"Scholars say the figurine is roughly contemporaneous with other early expressions of artistic creativity, like drawings on cave walls in southeastern France and northern Italy. The inspiration and symbolism behind the rather sudden flowering have long been debated by art historians.
"Commenting in the journal on the discovery, Dr. Mellars, who did not take part in the research, wrote that the artifact was one of 25 similar carvings found over the past 70 years in other caves in the Swabian region of southern Germany, “a veritable art gallery of early ‘modern’ human art.”
"These sites, he concluded, “must be seen as the birthplace of true sculpture in the European — maybe global — artistic tradition.”
"Scholars say the large caves were presumably inviting sanctuaries for populations of modern humans migrating then into Central and Western Europe. These were the people who eventually displaced the resident Neanderthals, around 30,000 years ago.
"Dr. Conard reported that the discovery was made beneath three feet of red-brown sediment in the floor of the Hohle Fels Cave. Six fragments of the carved ivory, including all but the left arm and shoulder, were recovered. When he brushed dirt off the torso, he said, “the importance of the discovery became apparent.”
"The short, squat torso is dominated by oversize breasts and broad buttocks. The split between the two halves of the buttocks is deep and continuous without interruption to the front of the figurine. A greatly enlarged vulva emphasizes the “deliberate exaggeration” of the figurine’s sexual characteristics, Dr. Conard said.
"The object reminded experts of the most famous of the sexually explicit figurines from the Stone Age, the Venus of Willendorf, discovered in Austria a century ago. That Venus is somewhat larger and dated about 24,000 years ago, but it is in a style that appeared to have been prevalent for several thousand years. Scholars speculate that these Venus figurines, as they are known, were associated with fertility beliefs or shamanistic rituals.
"The Hohle Fels artifact, less than 2.5 inches long and weighing little more than an ounce, is headless. Carved at the top, instead, is a ring, evidently to allow the object to be suspended from a string or thong."
"Though 77,000-year-old carvings have been found in South Africa, they consist of cross-hatched lines. Such abstractions are relatively simple compared to representational art, which requires high levels of cognition to both conceive and make.
"Perhaps not coincidentally, the rise of figurine-carving modern human cultures in Europe coincided with the decline of Neanderthals. Some anthropologists suspect that humans of the era experienced a leap in mental abilities, fueled by random genetic mutation or the neurological nourishment of language and culture.
“The advent of fully representational, ‘figurative’ art seems at present to be a European phenomenon, without any documented parallels in Africa or elsewhere earlier than about 30,000 years ago,” writes ... Paul Mellars in a commentary accompanying the discovery, published Wednesday in Nature.
“How far this ‘symbolic explosion’ associated with the origins and dispersal of our species reflects a major, mutation-driven reorganization in the cognitive capacities of the human brain — perhaps associated with a similar leap forward in the complexity of language — remains a fascinating and contentious issue,” he wrote.
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