35'000 Year Old Medallion Man Jewellery Found

[Beorn]

Ivory 'Venus' is first depiction of a woman

With its outsize bulbous breasts and hugely exaggerated genitalia, a statuette of a woman has pushed back the history of female figurative art by 5000 years, to at least 35,000 years ago.

Anthropologists are staggered by the find, which also shows that even this long ago, our brains and their ability to think in abstract ways were probably as sophisticated as they are now.

Discovered in the Hohle Fels Caves of south-western Germany, the "Venus" figurine carved from mammoth ivory is remarkably well-preserved, with only the left arm and shoulder missing. "It's perhaps the earliest example of figurative art worldwide," says Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Conard speculates from the exaggerated sexual features that the 6-centimetre-high figurine might have been a fertility symbol. A small loop where the head should be suggests that it may have been hung on a string and worn as a pendant. He points out that the previous oldest female "Venus" figurines are from about 27,000 years ago.

Jill Cook, who curates and studies ancient figurines at the British Museum in London, says that the implications go way beyond art by showing that our ancestors of 32,000 to 35,000 years ago had brains just like ours.
"It 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," she says. "You're dealing with a mind like ours, but simply a different time and environment."

Source

[Baron Samedi]

Ivory sculpture in Germany could be world's oldest
By PATRICK McGROARTY, Associated Press Writer Patrick Mcgroarty, Associated Press Writer Wed May 13, 3:42 pm ET

BERLIN – A 35,000-year-old ivory carving of a busty woman found in a German cave was unveiled Wednesday by archaeologists who believe it is the oldest known sculpture of the human form. The carving found in six fragments in Germany's Hohle Fels cave depicts a woman with a swollen belly, wide-set thighs and large, protruding breasts.

"It's very sexually charged," said University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard, whose team discovered the figure in September.

Carbon dating suggests it was carved at least 35,000 years ago, according to the researchers' findings, which are being published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature.

"It's the oldest known piece of figurative sculpture in the world," said Jill Cook, a curator of Paleolithic and Mesolithic material at the British Museum in London.

Stones in Israel and Africa almost twice as old are believed to have been collected by ancient humans because they resembled people, but they were not carved independently.

The Hohle Fels cave discovery suggests the humans, who are believed to have come to Europe around 40,000 years ago, had the intelligence to create symbols and think abstractly in a way that matches the modern human, Conard said.

"It's 100 percent certain that, by the time we get to 40,000 years ago in Swabia, we're dealing with people just like you and me," Conard told The Associated Press, referring to the southern German region where the sculpture was recovered along with other prehistoric artifacts.

Conard believes the 2.4-inch-tall (6-centimeter) figure may have been hung on the end of a string. The left arm is missing, but Conard said he hopes to find it by sifting through material from the cave.

The Hohle Fels sculpture is curvaceous and has neither feet nor a head, like some of the roughly 150 so-called Venus figurines found in a range from the Pyrenees mountains to southern Russia and dating back about 25,000-29,000 years.

But Cook warned against trying to draw any connections between the Venuses and the Hohle Fels figure, saying that would be like comparing Picasso to a classical sculptor — too much time had passed.

"I wonder whether at this point we're looking at figures which are unique within themselves and unique within the cultures that they're arising in," she said.

Archaeologist Paul Mellars, of the University of Cambridge, suggested a clearer continuum.

"We now have evidence of that sort of artistic tradition of Venus figurines going back 6,000 years earlier than anybody ever guessed," he said.

Neanderthals also lived in Europe around the time the sculpture was carved, and frequented the Hohle Fels cave. But Mellars said layered deposits left by both species over thousands of years prove the sculpture was crafted by humans.

"Nothing within a million miles of this has ever been found in a Neanderthal layer," Mellars said.

The archaeologists agreed the sculpture's age and features invite speculation about its purpose and the preoccupations of the culture that produced it.

Cook suggested it could be symbol of fertility, perhaps even portrayed in the act of giving birth.

Mellars suggested a more basic motivation for the carving: "These people were obsessed with sex."

Conard said the differing opinions reinforced the connection between the ancient artist and modern viewer.

"How we interpret it tells us just as much about ourselves as about people 40,000 years ago," he said.

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On the Net:

http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
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Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090513/...dest_sculpture