Posted on 05/13/2009 4:44:19 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
If human culture seems obsessed with sex lately, it's nothing new. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known artistic representation of a woman - a carved ivory statue of a naked female, dating from 35,000 years ago.
The figurine, unearthed in September 2008 in Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, may be the oldest known example of figurative art, meaning art that is supposed to represent and resemble a real person, animal or object. The discovery could help scientists understand the origins of art and the advent of symbolic thinking, including complicated language.
...
The fixation wasn't just for naked women, though. Early carvings of phalluses appeared in Europe at about the same time.
Little 'Venus'
The tiny statue is carved out of the tusk of a woolly mammoth and is less than 2.5 inches (60 millimeters) long. Instead of a head, it has a ring that scientists think meant it was worn as a pendant looped through string. Paleoanthropologist Nicholas Conard of Germany's Tubingen University reported the discovery in the May 14 issue of the journal Nature.
The oldest human art dates back much further, to between 75,000 and 95,000 years ago in Africa. But that art was abstract, and consisted of geometrical designs .. . This is the first known art to represent a woman, and possibly the first art to represent anything real at all. Another find, a simple drawing that may represent a half-man, half-animal, could be a few thousand years older, but the date on that is uncertain.
The jump from abstract art to representative art seems significant, and might reflect a leap in the cognitive capacity of the human brain around this time. Some experts think that the development might have gone along with a leap in the complexity of human language.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
35,000 years and it still hasn’t gotten old :^)
Personally I figured it went back further than that...
I’m still waiting for other pictures. ; )
Plaster Playboy ?
My right hand?? Wait! Let me change hands.
Yeah, like forever. Isn't this sort of a Captain Obvious report?
Obsession with Naked Women.......
She says that like it’s a bad thing.
Looks like Cartman’s girlfriend in the ep where he was ‘Dog’, the Bounty Hunter.
They didn't have Vogue back then so you just followed your nose, so to speak.
The writer offers opinions explicitly linking the exaggerated features of this figurine with sexuality. Far more plausible is the interpretation that the figure represents an attempt to honor, embody, and even capture the mystical power of the pregnant female. The existence of similar figurines from many places and times speaks of a nearly religious quest for some power beyond the grasp of human understanding, sometimes referred to as the “Eve Cult.”
plumpers
I would have hoped for more of a Vargas style.. but this is still pretty early on in “art development”. ;-)
The original subject of the work.
The obsession 35,001 years ago was Helen Thomas.
Helen Thomas was a hottie back then.
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