{"id":434,"date":"2009-05-17T10:24:27","date_gmt":"2009-05-16T22:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a_piece_of_palaeolithic_ertica\/"},"modified":"2009-05-17T10:24:27","modified_gmt":"2009-05-16T22:24:27","slug":"a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/","title":{"rendered":"a piece of palaeolithic er*tica?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"50\" alt=\"Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research\" width=\"80\" border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/09\/ResearchBlogging-Medium-White.png\" \/>&nbsp;She has enormous, protuberant breasts, huge buttocks, exaggerated genitalia, and no head. Oh, yes, and she&#8217;s 35,000 years old &#8211; the oldest &#8216;Venus&#8217; figurine to date (Conard, 2009).<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.viswiki.com\/en\/Venus_figurines\">&#8216;Venus&#8217; figurines<\/a> are fascinating artworks that have been found at a range of&nbsp;<i>Homo sapiens<\/i> sites throughout Europe. Almost all have the same swollen, pendulous breasts &amp; steatopygous buttocks as this new find, while they rarely show any facial features &amp; their arms &amp; legs are usually much reduced in relative size. The Venus described by Nicholas Conard (2009) was found at a site in Swabia, southwestern Germany, together with a range of tools and other&nbsp;material associated with the Aurignacian culture &#8211; developed by the earliest modern humans to move into Europe.<\/p>\n<p>Carved from mammoth ivory, the figurine seems to have been worn as a pendant, suspended from a ring that sits above the figure&#8217;s shoulders. While small, its arms are carefully carved, right down to the fingers. But the artist gave most attention to exaggerating its secondary sexual characteristics &#8211; as for the other Venuses, this is presumed to be&nbsp;<i>a direct or indirect expression of fertility<\/i> (Conard, 2009). This is the earliest known 3-D image of the female form, &amp; pushes back the time at which this sort of representational art developed: previously the earliest imagery was exclusinvely of animals &amp; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.intute.ac.uk\/artsandhumanities\/limelight\/iconographyplasticart.html\">&#8216;therianthropic&#8217; forms<\/a> (half-human half-animal images <a href=\"http:\/\/www.northernearth.co.uk\/stone.htm\">often interpreted as representing shamans<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>The Swabian region has turned out to be a rich repository of Aurignacian material. Four sites have yielded 25 small carvings in mammoth ivory: realistic mammals, more abstract bird-forms, and 2 therioanthropic figures. (There are also many ivory beads &amp; the earliest known musical instruments:&nbsp;flutes of bird wing bone &amp; mammoth ivory.) This has led Mellars&nbsp;(2009) to suggest that Swabia represents the birthplace of &#8216;European&#8217; sculpture &#8211; &amp; in fact there&#8217;s no evidence of this sort of representational art, from the same or an earlier time period, anywhere else in the world. Mellars describes this as a &#8216;symbolic explosion&#8217;, but notes that we&#8217;ve no way of knowing whether this reflects an underlying, heritable, reorganisation in the way the human brain perceives &amp; responds to the world. As he says, this remains&nbsp;<i>a fascinating and contentious issue.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><cite>N.J.Conard (2009) A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany.&nbsp;<u>Nature<\/u> <b>459<\/b>: 248-252 doi:10.1038\/nature07995<\/cite><\/p>\n<p><cite>P.Mellars (2009) Origins of the female image.&nbsp;<u>Nature<\/u> <b>459<\/b>: 176-177<\/cite><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;She has enormous, protuberant breasts, huge buttocks, exaggerated genitalia, and no head. Oh, yes, and she&#8217;s 35,000 years old &#8211; the oldest &#8216;Venus&#8217; figurine to date (Conard, 2009).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":1465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[9,14],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>a piece of palaeolithic er*tica? : BioBlog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"a piece of palaeolithic er*tica? : BioBlog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&nbsp;She has enormous, protuberant breasts, huge buttocks, exaggerated genitalia, and no head. Oh, yes, and she&#8217;s 35,000 years old &#8211; the oldest &#8216;Venus&#8217; figurine to date (Conard, 2009).\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"BioBlog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-05-16T22:24:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/09\/image002.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"840\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"295\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Alison\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@AcampbelTeacher\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Alison\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/\",\"name\":\"a piece of palaeolithic er*tica? : BioBlog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/09\/image002.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2009-05-16T22:24:27+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2009-05-16T22:24:27+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/#\/schema\/person\/9676347d9dce672ed12b14407e623cea\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-NZ\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-NZ\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/09\/image002.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/09\/image002.jpg\",\"width\":840,\"height\":295},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"a piece of palaeolithic er*tica?\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/\",\"name\":\"BioBlog\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-NZ\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/#\/schema\/person\/9676347d9dce672ed12b14407e623cea\",\"name\":\"Alison\",\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/x.com\/AcampbelTeacher\"],\"url\":\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/author\/acampbel\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"a piece of palaeolithic er*tica? : BioBlog","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2009\/05\/a-piece-of-palaeolithic-ertica\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"a piece of palaeolithic er*tica? : BioBlog","og_description":"&nbsp;She has enormous, protuberant breasts, huge buttocks, exaggerated genitalia, and no head. 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