Sexy "Venus" May Be
Oldest Figurine Yet Discovered
LONDON - A sexually suggestive Venus figurine with
oversized breasts and thighs dates back
at least 35,000 years and shows ancient humans had sex on their
minds, researchers said on
Wednesday.
The 60-millimetre-long figurine may be the oldest piece
of its kind yet discovered and suggests
Palaeolithic art was far more complex than many had thought, Nicholas Conard of Tubingen
University in Germany wrote in the journal
Nature.
Radiocarbon dating indicates the figure excavated from
an archaeological dig in southern
Germany, near the Danube valley, was at least 35,000 years old,
the researchers said.
"The discovery predates the well-known Venuses from the
Gravettian culture by at least 5,000
years and radically changes our views of the context and
meaning of the earliest Palaeolithic art,"
Conard wrote.
"Before this discovery ... female imagery was entirely
unknown."
The figurine's enlarged breasts, bloated belly and
thighs also make clear that sexual symbolism
was alive and well tens of thousand of years ago, Paul Mellars
of the University of Cambridge,
wrote in a commentary.
"The feature of the newly discovered figure that will
undoubtedly command most attention is its
explicitly, almost aggressively, sexual nature, focused
on the sexual characteristics of the female
form," he wrote.
"Whichever way one views these representations, it is
clear that the sexually symbolic dimension
in European (and indeed worldwide) art has a long
ancestry in the evolution of our species."
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