The 160-year mystery of Europe's Ice Age 'queens'
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQfElg77sCA
Due to your link I'm now listening to the Dry album from start to finish and really enjoying it.
So thanks friend for brightening my Sunday morning!
Ancient people really did like digging holes and hanging out underground. Mind you, modern people do too.
From this tweet with photos for reference:
It probably wasn’t the women examining their own bodies, but a sculptor examining the bodies of women lying down.
or because faces, hands and feet are hard to get sexy
Ask any teenage boy (or a former one) who tried to draw naked ladies if he drew hands or feet. Exclude feet fetishists.
This reminded me about D. E. Harding's "On Having No Head".
And also about the stereotype suggesting ladies are prone to self-perception biased in a specific way - often seeing themselves as overweight even when perfectly fit.
Could these ways of thinking exist (notably worldwide, also notably supposedly predating abstraction-capable languages) even during the prehistoric days when there was no modern kind of cultural influence?
Women are still centre-stage of nowadays artworks, probably for a different reason than in the past. I remember my sister complaining about how little artwork there was of male characters compared to female characters on the Internet.
Specifically, the figurines tended to get more stretched out, and more abstract (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Monruz#/media/File:La...)
As this trend continued, the statues started looking less like figurines of women, and more like...phaluses, e.g. https://www.donsmaps.com/milandesvenus.html
What are we to make of this? Sheer speculation of course, but I wonder if it has something to do with those european tribes discovering that it was sex which caused pregnancy. It might seem incredible that we didn't always know this, but even into the 20th century, we were discovering cultures which hadn't made that connection yet.
So imagine you have no idea where babies come from...just every once in a while, a woman would grow a belly and start putting on fat...and a baby would come. Sexy, sacred, and mysterious...and very worthy of making artwork to celebrate.
Eventually, however, they made the connection. I think these later venus figurines are attempts to acknowledge the male role in reproduction--and also attempts to reconcile their sense of the sacred with both the godlike-power females have to produce new people, with the newly discovered godlike power males have to get females pregnant.
Perhaps it also documents the transition from female, earth-mother-based religion to the sky-daddy-based religions we've had ever since.
You find it surprising, that there were actual woman around in the ice age?
Only when you need to paint or sculpt very fine details, one needs a model to sit still for hours. To model the basic shape like the Venus, it would be enough to sit in a corner and watch other women, or one women in particular.
- some researcher in 3009 ACR
> "Oh, he comes back every two weeks or so. We gave him this big box of chocolates when he first arrived. Why? What'd you guys do?"
Its porn.
Why do so many artists draw anime girls and post them on twitter?
Cause they’re bored, cause they want to practice their skills, cause they want to impress their friends, cause they’re horny, ... Probably the same here.
These figurines are interesting because of the large geographical and temporal distribution long before humans even invented writing.
However I think this article is overselling the similarities between the hundreds of figures found.
I don't think purpose is the right word here, nor is it what being investigated.
Had they been dolls, they would have been intended to be used by children.
The first supposition might be supported by the fact that carving any of these would have required much work, which might have not been justified for just making toys.
On the other hand it is easier to imagine children playing with such small statues than a busy adult using them for any purpose. It is unlikely that the kind of dwellings that may have existed at that time included any part that could have been decorated with such figures.
The article contains the supposition that they may have been used as some kind of home guardians, but the choice of a small feisty female figure does not seem very appropriate for such a role (instead of a more scary guardian).
Perhaps they could have been owned by some shamans who used them in some rituals and they were small to be easily carried in their luggage, but being just toys for children seems an equally likely possibility.
Given that these figurines were being produced for over 10k years with a global distribution, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that multiple mutually exclusive interpretations could have been true in different places and times.
And, hell, Barbie. In the last 100 years, we have observed a doll in the form of an adult woman go from being successfully marketed to adult men, to being successfully marketed to young girls. Why would we assume these Venus figurines had a single purpose?
Emphasizing the fertility in the statues is a reason to believe that they could have been intended for use in some rituals or as good-luck charms, but it certainly would not have been a reason to censor their use by children who would have been habitually exposed to nudity, unlike today.