Venus Statues

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Venus of vom Hohlen Fels

The oldest known sculptures of human figures are the Upper Paleolithic "Venuses" found in Russia, the Ukraine, Austria, the Ancient Near East, the Czech Republic, Crete, Western Asia, France and the Aegean. Dated to 27,000 to 20,000 years ago, the figurines were usually made of soapstone, limestone, calcite serpentine and ivory. Some were made from ceramics (See Above).

Venus figurines are one of the characteristic art forms of the Upper Paleolithic period. Most date to between 28,000 and 25,000 years ago. The oldest found so far is the (5-centimeter (2-inch) -long Venus of Hohle Fels, which is made from mammoth ivory. It was found in a cave in the Swabian Alps in southwest Germany, along with a vulture bone flute, and is thought to be at least 35,000 years old. One of the most famous figurines is the Venus of Willendorf, found in Austria in 1908. It dates to between 32,000 and 27,000 years ago. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, June 24, 2019]

Many depict pregnant women with blank faces, huge breasts and exaggerated sexual parts. Some show the women in positions associated with giving birth. Men were rarely depicted as figurines. They were more likely to be seen in a hunting scene painted on a cave walls.

The first Venus figurines were found in the 1880s in caves near Monaco. Not long after a fat, big breasted Venus was found in Austria that was dated to be 25,000 to 22,000 years old. Most Venus figurines have been found in Central Europe and Russia. Many were found in caves and open-air sites with stone and bone weaponry, ivory jewelry, and the remains of Ice Age animals.

Many Venus statues were perforated at the ankles presumably so they could suspended upside down. The Black Venus is nearly 26,000-years-old figure found in the Czech village of Dolní Vestonice in 1924. Splintered and made of clay, it was found on a hill among charred, fractured mammoth bones.

Venus Production in France

On a four-centimeter (1.57-inch) - tall, 23,000-year-old Venus made of chalk from Amiens, France, Archaeology magazine reported: More than 20,000 years ago, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers set up seasonal camps in what is now the neighborhood of Renancourt in the southwest section of the city and lived there for a few weeks at the end of each summer. There they made projectile points, knives, scrapers, and jewelry. And one talented artist — or artists — began to carve small female figurines. This example, the Venus of Renancourt, was recently discovered 12 feet below the ground in the same area where 14 other tiny female figurines have been unearthed since 2015. Found alongside them were thousands of chalk fragments that appear to be waste from the production of these diminutive sculptures. [Source: Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology magazine, March-April 2020]

According to archaeologist Clément Paris of France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research, the site at Renancourt provides rare evidence for modern humans in this region during the Gravettian period (28,000 — 22,000 years ago). Although the other 14 female figurines — a collection that has doubled the number of such sculptures known from Paleolithic France — are distinctive, Paris explains that the quality and level of detail of this new find have surprised archaeologists. “The hairstyle, in particular, is represented by fine incisions in the form of a grid,” he says. Although other archaeological deposits from the same period are known to have been the remains of workshops, they are from earlier excavations dating to the 1950s, when modern techniques were not available. “In the coming years, we want to try to understand how the figurines were made,” says Paris, “and to explain the purpose of these still-enigmatic artifacts.”

Dolni Vestonice

back of a Venus from Dolni Vestonice

Many Venuses and some of earliest known ceramics were found at Dolni Vestonice and Pavlove, hill sites in the Czech Republic that were the home of prehistoric seasonal camps. Thousands of fragments of human figures, as well as the kilns that produced them have been found in sites in Moravia in what is now Russia the Czech Republic. Some have been dated to be 26,000 years old. The figurines were made from moistened loess, a fine sediment, and fired at high temperatures. Predating the first known ceramic vessels by 10,000 years, the figurines, some scientists believe, were produced and exploded on purpose based on the fact that most of the sculptures have been found in pieces.

Dolni Vestonice has been dated to 27,000 B.C. and has been called the world’s oldest village but most scholars argue is too small and too rudimentary to qualify as a village or town. In any case a number of important discoveries related to early man have been found there. Dolni Vestonice is the site of the earliest known potter’s kiln. Carved and molded images of animals, women, strange engravings, personal ornaments, and decorated graves have been found scattered over several acres at the site. In the main hut, where the people ate and slept, two items were found: a goddess figurine made of fired clay and a small and cautiously carved portrait made from mammoth ivory of a woman whose face was drooped on one side. The goddess figurine is the oldest known baked clay figurine. On top of its head are holes which may have held grasses or herbs. The potter scratched two slits that stretched from the eyes to the chest which were thought to be the life-giving tears of the mother goddess. [Source: mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/europe/dolni_vestonice]

Some of the sculpture may represent the first example of portraiture (representation of an actual person). One such figure, carved in mammoth ivory, is roughly three inches high. The subject appears to be a young man with heavy bone structure, thick, long hair reaching past his shoulders, and possibly the traces of a beard. Particle spectrometry analysis dated it to be around 29,000 years old. The remains of a kiln was found on an encampment in a small, dry-hut, whose door faced towards the east. Scattered around the oven were many fragments of fired clay. Remains of clay animals, some stabbed as if hunted, and other pieces of blackened pottery still bear the fingerprints of the potter. [Source: Wikipedia]

Meaning of the Venuses

Venus figurines were given the name of an ancient Greek goddess in the 19th century, because they often portrayed a pregnant woman, and it was thought they represented a prehistoric goddess figure; but archaeologists have also found a few Venus figurines portraying males, or combining female and male attributes. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, June 24, 2019]

"Until the 1980s," wrote John Noble Wilford in the New York Times, "the favored interpretation related the figurines to fertility. But fertility rites are associated with agricultural societies, and these were hunter-gatherers living thousands of years before crop cultivation...In a hunter-gatherer society, the men, who hunted, often came home empty-handed, which meant that it fell to the women, who gathered, to provide much of the food. Since many of the figurines had holes, and so must have been worn as pendants, men may have carried them on the hunt as reminders of hearth and home. But there is no evidence...that the figurines meant that women were worshipped as goddesses." [Source: John Noble Wilford, the New York Times, February 1, 1994]

Palaeolithic Venuses raise a lot of puzzling questions: How come these almost identical figurines were found all the way from France to Siberia? How come this stylised carving tradition was practised and passed down over 20,000 years? What purpose did they serve? Some of the Venuses made from wooly mammoth ivory were found in southern Europe, where the animals did not live. This suggests people near the Mediterranean traded or at least had some contact with the mammoth hunters in northern Europe. [Source: Bob Brockie, The Dominion Post April 9, 2007]

Venuses from Eastern Europe

Kostenki I Venus

In May 2009, a picture and information on the oldest known Venus statue was released by the University of Tuebingen. Found in a cave in the German town of Hohle Fels, the figure was carved from mammoth ivory and was dated to be about 35,000 years old. Measuring about 10 centimeters tall and five centimeters wide, it has enormous breasts, belly and hips; a vagina; a chubby, chunky body and a tiny head.

According to Archaeology magazine: An extraordinary 23,000-year-old figurine was unearthed in the Bryansk region of western Russia alongside stone tools, painted mammoth bones, and bison remains. The tiny two-inch statuette is carved from mammoth tusk and represents a possibly pregnant woman, rendered with exaggerated proportions. She is one of only a few existing small Paleolithic sculptures known as Venus figurines, thought to embody an ancient, idealized concept of femininity. Experts believe they may have served ritual or ceremonial purposes, perhaps associated with fertility. [Source: Archaeology magazine, Jason Urbanusm July-August 2017]

A 15,000-year-old bone pendant found at Vlakno Cave in Croatia may be a late type of Venus figurine, such as the famous Venus of Willendorf, which dates to more than 24,000 years ago. The Croatian Venus is a more slender and abstract human figure than the zaftig woman of Willendorf. The geometric pattern on the bone is similar to patterns found on other pieces of art from the Epigravettian period, during which sea levels were approximately 400 feet lower than they are now. What is today the northern Adriatic Sea was a broad plain that supported large herds of game animals hunted by the people at Vlakno. Other than the Venus pendant, however, no art produced by the Epigravettian people has turned up. Some perforated deer teeth and seashells are the only other symbolic artifacts found at the site. [Source: Zach Zorich, Archaeology magazine, March-April 2018]

Venus of Willendorf

The Venus of Willendorf from Austria is arguably the most famous Venus. Jarrett A. Lobell wrote in Archaeology Magazine: For more than a century since the 30,000-year-old stone sculpture known as the Venus of Willendorf was found on the banks of the Danube River in its eponymous village, many unknowns have swirled around the 4.3-inch-tall figurine. But the lingering mystery of where the material used to make the sculpture originated has now been solved, opening new avenues of research into how far people of the Gravettian period (ca. 30,000 — 22,000 years ago) traveled. Using a technique called high-resolution micro-computed tomography, a team led by Gerhard Weber of the University of Vienna scanned the figurine. [Source: Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology Magazine, January/February 2023]

Several other figurines with which it was found were made of ivory, but the Venus was fashioned from oolitic limestone, a type of sedimentary rock whose composition varies greatly by location. “Oolite acts like a kind of geological fingerprint,” Weber says. The team expected to find that the stone had been sourced within 100 miles of Willendorf. Instead, to their surprise, they discovered that it had come from some 450 miles away, near Sega di Ala in the Italian Alps. The researchers believe the figurine was likely carved there before being carried across the mountains. “While this journey could have taken years, decades, or centuries,” says Weber, “finding a way through the Alps might not have been as big a barrier in the Ice Age as we always imagine.”

Colored dots showing embedded limonites; limonite cavities on haunch and leg; existing hole enlarged for navelThe high-resolution scans also allowed researchers to see details of structural components of the sculpture that have always been puzzling. They now know that hemispherical cavities on the surface of the limestone were once filled by limonites, or iron oxide concretions, that likely fell out during the carving process because they are harder than the limestone. One of these cavities is in the center of the figurine’s stomach where the navel should be. “There are some traces, such as furrows from a tool, that suggest this limonite could have been removed intentionally, which would mean the artist already had a very precise idea of the later shape of the figurine,” says Weber. “That would tell us a lot about these Paleolithic people’s thinking.”

View of the Venus of Willendorf from four sides

Venuses: Paleolithic Pornography?

Some scientists have even suggested the figurines were some kind of ice age pornography. "That always possible, Dr, Patricia Rice, an anthropologist at West Virginia told the New York Times, "But I say no. If it were, the figurines would have been much more realistic." The 'Venus of Willendorf' figurine at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria is considered a masterpiece of paleolithic art. Nevertheless, it has been censored by Facebook, drawing an indignant response from the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

Bob Brockie wrote in The Dominion Post: “Professor Dale Guthrie, from the university of Alaska, and author of The Nature of Paleolithic Art, is surprised that while Paleolithic people were surrounded by plenty of things – babies, men, animals, plants, battle scenes, clan symbols – these things were never represented in their art, only well-endowed women. Guthrie suggests that all the figurines were made by young men and “it’s not too difficult to theorise about what was on their minds in their free time”. He thinks the similarly stylised Venus figures represent a cross-cultural view of women shared by prehistoric Europeans – well prehistoric men – for more than 20,000 years. [Source: Bob, Brockie,The Dominion Post April 9, 2007]

April Nowell told New Scientist Magazine: “The idea that curvaceous figurines are prehistoric pornography is an excuse to legitimise modern behaviour as having ancient roots. The Venus figurines of women, some with exaggerated anatomical features, and ancient rock art, like the image from the Abri Castanet site in France that is supposedly of female genitalia. [Source: April Nowell Jude Isabella, New Scientist Magazine, November 13, 2012 /*]

“People are fascinated by prehistory, and the media want to write stories that attract readers – to use a cliché, sex sells. But when a New York Times headline reads “A Precursor to Playboy: Graphic Images in Rock”, and Discover magazine asserts that man’s obsession with pornography dates back to “Cro-Magnon days” based on “the famous 26,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf statuette…[with] GG-cup breasts and a hippopotamal butt”, I think a line is crossed. To be fair, archaeologists are partially responsible – we need to choose our words carefully. /*\

World's Oldest Figurative Art “Pornographic"?

20120206-Malta Venus_of_Malta.jpg
Malta Venus Chip Walter wrote in National Geographic: “In Hohle Fels, Conard’s team recently uncovered some objects whose messages are so sexually explicit they might require a parental warning. One is a carving of a woman with exaggerated breasts and genitalia, found in 2008. At least 35,000 years old, the Venus of Hohle Fels is the most ancient figure yet discovered that is indisputably human. (Two much earlier figurines from Morocco and what is now Israel may be natural rocks that vaguely resemble the human form.) Earlier the team had found a polished rod of siltstone, about eight inches long and an inch in diameter, with a ring etched at one end—likely a phallic symbol. A few feet away from the Venus figurine, Conard’s team uncovered a flute carved from a hollow griffon vulture bone, and in Geissenklösterle Cave found three other flutes, one made of ivory and two fashioned from a swan’s wing bone. They are the oldest known musical instruments in the world. We don’t know whether these people had drugs. But they clearly had the sex and rock and roll. [Source: Chip Walter, National Geographic, January 2015]

Eliza Strickland wrote in Discover: “A tiny ivory carving of a busty woman may be not only the oldest known example of erotic art–it may be the oldest art depicting any human figure at all. Named the Venus of Hohle Fels after the cave in southwestern Germany where it was recently excavated, the object dates to at least 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, based on more than 30 radiocarbon measurements conducted at the site [Discovery News]. The statue is also “bordering on the pornographic” by our modern standards, one expert says, with its huge, bulbous breasts and oversized genitalia. [Source: Eliza Strickland, Discover, May 13, 2009]/^\

“Germany’s southern caves were presumably inviting sanctuaries, scholars say, for populations of modern humans migrating then into central and western Europe. These were the people who eventually displaced the resident Neanderthals, around 30,000 years ago. Dr. Conard reported that the discovery was made beneath three feet of red-brown sediment in the floor of the Hohle Fels cave. Six fragments of the carved ivory, including all but the left arm and shoulder, were recovered. When he brushed dirt off the torso, he said, “the importance of the discovery became apparent” [The New York Times]. /^\

“The Venus, which is described in a paper in Nature, was carved from a woolly mammoth tusk, and measures just over two inches long. In place of a head the statue has a polished ring, suggesting that the carving may have been hung from a string and worn like a pendant. The newfound object reminds experts of the most famous of the sexually explicit figurines from the Stone Age, the Venus of Willendorf, discovered in Austria a century ago. It was somewhat larger and dated at about 24,000 years ago, but it was in a style that appeared to be prevalent for several thousand years. Scholars speculate that these Venus figurines, as they are known, were associated with fertility beliefs or shamanistic rituals [The New York Times]. /^\

“Or there may be a simpler explanation for why the Venus of Hohle Fels was carved, argues anthropologist Paul Mellars, who wrote a commentary on the find in Nature. “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…. But if humans hadn’t been largely obsessed with sex they wouldn’t have survived for the first 2 million years. None of this is at all surprising” [LiveScience], he says. /^\

“Human-made art goes back further in our history; the first abstract, geometric designs date from around 75,000 years ago. But the jump to figurative art is a significant cognitive step, researchers say, and could be tied to the development of language, another symbolic system. Jill Cook, an expert on ancient figurines, says the Venus “shows that people at this time in Europe had reached a stage in development of the brain which enabled objects to be symbolised and abstracted…. You’re dealing with a mind like ours, but simply a different time and environment” [New Scientist]. /^\

Multiple Interpretations of the Meaning of Female Figurines

Statuette of a woman from Hoyucek Tongeren

April Nowell told New Scientist Magazine: Upper Palaeolithic figurines “are incredibly varied beyond the few figurines seen over and over again: the Venus of Hohle Fels, the Venus of Willendorf and the Venus of Dolní Ve?stonice. Some are male, some are female; some are human, some are animals or fantastical creatures; some wear items of clothing, others do not. A recent study by my doctoral student Allison Tripp and her colleague Naomi Schmidt demonstrated that the body shapes of female figurines from around 25,000 years ago correspond to women at many different stages of life; they’re a variety of shapes and sizes. All of this suggests that there are multiple interpretations.[Source: April Nowell Jude Isabella, New Scientist Magazine, November 13, 2012. Nowell is a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Her paper “Pornography is in the eye of the beholder: Sex, sexuality and sexism in the study of Upper Paleolithic figurines” was co-authored with Melanie Chang /*]

“When we interpret Palaeolithic art more broadly, we talk about “hunting magic” or “religion” or “fertility magic.” I don’t think these interpretations have the same social ramifications as pornography. When respected journals – Nature for example – use terms such as “Prehistoric pin-up” and “35,000-year-old sex object”, and a German museum proclaims that a figurine is either an “earth mother or pin-up girl” (as if no other roles for women could have existed in prehistory), they carry weight and authority. This allows journalists and researchers, evolutionary psychologists in particular, to legitimise and naturalise contemporary western values and behaviours by tracing them back to the “mist of prehistory”.

“The French, in particular, are doing incredible work analysing paint recipes and tracing the movement of the ancient artists as they painted. We may never have the knowledge to say, “This painting of a bison meant this”, but I am confident that a detailed study of the corpus of ice age imagery, including the figurines, will give us a window on to the “lived life” in the Palaeolithic.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024