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From today's New York Times comes this image of a figure found in a cave in South Western Germany last September.
Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, said it was at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe
In the place of her head, there is a ring - almost certaibly there to accommodate a string or thong. We can only speculate who would have worn her and why.
3 comments:
This is wonderful, good article about it in the Independent.
It didn't stop the BBC morning news and some British papers from sadly describing it as "possible early pornography" though.
They appeared on media in Japan, so they are famous in my country as well!!!
I'm with you Paul. I was disheartened to read an article about this wherein the "expert" said the ancient people who created it were obsessed with sex and that the pendant was ancient porn. To say such a thing denotes an obviously ethnocentric mistake of placing our modern ideas about sex onto the ancients. Sex only became a dirty, pornographic idea in comparatively recent times. To us sex is for fun and pregnancy must either be controlled or avoided. To those living many thousands of years ago sex was the sacred and magical act that created life. Really irks the hell out of me that these historians are either completely missing the point or being misquoted or that their comments are taken out of context.
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