They're Big, They're Boobs, They're Featured In The News - Hohle Fels Aurignacian Figurine Dated to 35 kya

Dienekes' Anthropology Blog: 35,000-year old female figurine from Hohle Fels Cave

Such has been the enthusiastic coverage of the 35,000 year-old mammoth ivory figurine found recently in south-western Germany, notably along the lines that this apparently represents the earliest known pornography, I was slightly surprised to see the phwooarr count in the tabloid press strangely low, although The Mail ran the story and published a nice few images therein.

The broadsheets did however go for this story with more gusto, with The Telegraph, (in their Arts & Culture section), chipping in with this timeless observation...

The prehistoric figurine, named 'Venus' after the Roman goddess of love, was no Kate Moss as small buttocks and a slender waist are very much a modern trend.

Cavemen were obsessed with big breasts and bottoms and exaggerated these traits in their art as they regarded these parts of the female anatomy as signs of fertility.

So now we know, and having digested that little gem, it's off to The Guardian who have gone with a little feature called Ancient Erotica: Art Through the Ages, in which they've availed themselves of the opportunity to post a series of 13 images from the distant past, depicting various parts of the anatomy and related activities in a tasteful, yet somehow still-a-bit-tabloidy fashion. The New York Times has a good piece by John Noble Wilford, and they too have a pictorial mini-feature on so-called porn of the past.

The London Times ran what appeared to be an informative article, sparking this response from one of their readers...

Looks more like a chicken to me

Lisa, Forsyth, US

Way to go, Lisa - meanwhile, over at The Independent, the following observation was made...

The latest Venus figurine is also adorned with enigmatic and possibly symbolic markings in the form of repeatedly incised lines that might conceivably represent the depiction of clothing, according to Dr Mellars. Other Venus figurines from the later period also show criss-cross designs or patterns etched on to their surfaces.

The Venus of Willendorf is a good example, as depicted here at the excellent Don's Maps site, as the head is circumscribed by lines that have been interpreted as possibly representing some sort of head-wear. The fact that someone went to the trouble of incising these lines on the figurine might well hint towards a more symbolic import attached to the figurine, rather than what in my opinion, are rather weak claims for this being a 'prehistoric pin-up', as described at Nature.


And thus having checked some of the newspaper stories, it's time to look at the abstract of the paper which is published in Nature Letters..

Despite well over 100 years of research and debate, the origins of art remain contentious1, 2, 3. In recent years, abstract depictions have been documented at southern African sites dating to approx75 kyr before present (bp)4, 5, and the earliest figurative art, which is often seen as an important proxy for advanced symbolic communication, has been documented in Europe as dating to between 30 and 40 kyr bp 2.

Here I report the discovery of a female mammoth-ivory figurine in the basal Aurignacian deposit at Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany during excavations in 2008.

This figurine was produced at least 35,000 calendar years ago, making it one of the oldest known examples of figurative art. This 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.

As mentioned at Dieneke's Blog, there is a free online video at Nature, namely 'Prehistoric Pin-up', in which we hear from archaeologist Maria Malina, who is part of the Hohle Fels excavation team, and Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen.

Because the figurine is reported to have been found at the base of the Aurignacian levels, this artefact is being touted as evidence that anatomically modern humans began creating figurative art as soon as they arrived in this part of Europe, which had previously only been occupied by Neanderthals, whom it is claimed, didn't engage in this type of symbolic activity.

However, as I never tire of pointing out, researcher Robert Bednarik has assembled significant evidence of just such activities dating all the way back to the Lower Palaeolithic, and this linked article, 'Beads And The Origins Of Symbolism' is essential reading for anyone believing that lateral thought and symbolic representation only occurred as late as the Upper Palaeolithic; here's a snippet from that essay...

An animal tooth, such as the wolf’s incisor from the Repolusthöhle, is much more difficult to perforate. At the time of the advent of Upper Palaeolithic technology, between 40 and 30 ka ago, even stone materials were perforated, to be used as pendants. The earliest examples are the broken specimen from Shiyu wenhua in central China (Figure 5) and several items from Kostenki 17, made from stone, fossil coral and belemnites (Bednarik 1995d: Fig. 4). However, the sparse record available to us provides no indication of an ‘evolution’ in the standard of workmanship.

On the contrary, some of the older examples are much better produced than the more recent. The Libyan Acheulian beads are more carefully made than the Upper Palaeolithic specimens from India (Figure 3). The perforation on the Repolusthöhle tooth is significantly finer than the clumsily made holes in the two Bacho Kiro teeth, which are ‘merely’ 42 ka old (Marshack 1991).

There can be no doubt that even the earliest beads and pendants we currently have involved a great deal of skill and understanding of material properties in their production. The hominids who made them were outstanding craftsmen.

There is a debate surrounding the dating of this figurine, which Conard has suggested may date back even earlier, to 40,000 years, as we see from Science Now...

Conard used radiocarbon dates from bones and other artifacts found nearby to date the figurine. "It's at least 35,000 calendar years old, but I think it's much older than that," Conard says. The fragments were found within a few centimeters of each other close to the bottom of a layer that represents the first arrival of modern humans in Europe--a period known as the Aurignacian that dates back 40,000 years. "This confirms figurative imagery is part of the Aurignacian from day one," Conard says.

However, João Zilhão, who perceives anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals as being much more behaviourally similar to one another than this latest research suggests, disagrees, as we see...

Archaeologist João Zilhão of Bristol University in the United Kingdom says Conard is cherry-picking the best dates to reinforce his case that modern humans began creating art almost as soon as they arrived in Europe.

"It's a very important find and highlights the good work the Tübingen group is doing," Zilhão says, but he argues that the figurine seems likely to be from about the same period as the other artifacts found in the Swabian caves--5000 years after humans arrived in Europe. The art's timing plays into a larger debate over the origins of human behavior and whether early modern humans were cognitively more advanced than the Neandertals they competed with and eventually replaced (ScienceNOW, 13 September 2006).

All of which gets us no nearer to discovering whether this figurine and its later counterparts of 10,000 years later, were crafted by the hand of a woman, man or child.


Reference: Letters - Nature 459, 248-252 (14 May 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07995; Received 24 January 2009; Accepted 17 March 2009 A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany


see also : John Hawks - Awkward Moments When Reading 1 & 2

and Zenobia: The Newest Uppity Stone-Age Venus


image from BBC News