ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN Germany have discovered 35,000 year-old proof of man’s one-track mind.
Massive breasts, broad hips, exaggerated sexual organs and no head: that is how our Ice Age fathers viewed their women – judging by the ivory figurine uncovered in southwest Germany that is being hailed as an anthropological sensation.
Just 6cm long and dubbed “Venus” after the goddess of love and beauty, the statue is the oldest of its kind ever found and may force a drastic rewriting of the development of art among early humans.
"The thing is loaded with sexual energy," said Nicholas Conard, a US-born anthropologist whose team found the figurine last September, in Naturemagazine.
“I showed the piece to a male colleague and he said, ‘Well well, I see that not much has changed in the last 40,000 years’.”
Experts believe the yellowed statue, carved from a woolly mammoth, was worn around the neck and may have served as a symbolic representation of fertility.
The statue was discovered in six pieces in the “Hohe Fels” cave south of the Swabian town of Ulm in southwestern Germany.
Radiocarbon dating placed the layer of debris in which it was found, three metres beneath the cave floor, at 35,000 to 40,000 years old. “I was speechless, the whole team was,” said Dr Conard. Until now, the oldest such statues found were estimated to be 25,000 to 30,000 years old.
The Swabian cave Venus called home for 4,000 centuries has been a rich hunting ground for Conard and his team: four years ago a dig uncovered a stone penis estimated to be about 28,000 years old.
Unlike Venus, however, the stone member was a generous 20cm long.
“If there’s one conclusion you want to draw from this, it’s that an obsession with sex goes back at least 35,000 years,” said Cambridge anthropologist Prof Paul Mellars, uninvolved in the dig, to German radio.
“But if humans hadn’t been largely obsessed with sex they wouldn’t have survived for the first two million years. None of this is at all surprising.”
Anyone anxious to sneak a peek at the world's oldest nude woman should get to Stuttgart in September for the exhibition Ice Age: Art and Culture. Ask for Venus.