The 160-year mystery of Europe's Ice Age 'queens'

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240307-the-160-year-mystery-of-the-stone-age-venus-figurines

by nkurz • 2 years ago

93 52 2 years ago

stevenwoo• 2 years ago

We will never know but it is a fascinating topic and interesting to read all the speculation, the one thing tying the dimensions to climate is wild that anyone even thought to investigate.

pan69• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the song Sheela-Na-Gig by PJ Harvey. Growing up I had no idea what it was about, only later to find out (as with so many other things in life).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQfElg77sCA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheela-Na-Gig_(song)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheela_na_gig

Contortion• 2 years ago

Somehow, despite being an alt-rock fan since my early teens, PJ Harvey had completely passed me by in all but name.

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!

gilleain• 2 years ago

This is now very off-topic to Ice Age Queens ... but yes PJ Harvey has some great tracks - one of my favourites is from the album '4 Track Demos', called 'M-Bike' that's about a motorbike as the focus of hatred of a boyfriend (I guess). It's great.

defrost• 2 years ago

Add this to your list: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Henry Lee ft. P.J Harvey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzmMB8dTwGs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Hunting

thom• 2 years ago

Oh wow, somewhat jealous of the rest of your Sunday now. Would love to be able to listen to music with fresh ears. And to be a teenage boy watching her 1995 Glastonbury set again…

pimlottc• 2 years ago

There's an official music video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQfElg77sCA

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

Perhaps just the ancestors of Barbie dolls?

dvh• 2 years ago

Or Viagra

ptsneves2• 2 years ago

The article just mentions them as being pre-historic pinups. Curiously the romans left us lots of phaluses but I don’t remember venuses being prevalent. Great cocktail material

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

The supposition of them being pinups implies that they were intended to be used by adults.

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.

Anotheroneagain• 2 years ago

Imagine trying to figure out a crucifix pendant separated by 50000 years of unrecorded history, and just give up on any hope to figure it out.

berkes• 2 years ago

"This old culture clearly worshipped violence and torture"

  - some researcher in 3009 ACR

(ACR-After Climate Restore)

aebtebeten• 2 years ago

see https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-11-24

"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?"

YeGoblynQueenne• 2 years ago

Or imagine finding a Mickey Mouse figurine and wondering why the ancients depicted a human child with the head of a rat. There is no end of symbolic interpretations one could place on what is just a bit of whimsy.

mytailorisrich2• 2 years ago

Since these are realistic, to me it means that the artists had an actual model if front of them. This what I find very interesting considering we expect that the environment was very harsh and it perhaps gives some weight to the 'queen' hypothesis.

lukan2• 2 years ago

"Since these are realistic, to me it means that the artists had an actual model if front of them"

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.

mytailorisrich2• 2 years ago

Obviously I find it surprising that they had "severely overweight" models... which is the whole point.

gyomu• 2 years ago

I think we tend to overestimate the purposefulness of things humans do.

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.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

I think you may underestimate the purposefulness of anime girls.

ramon156• 2 years ago

I'm still trying to find the correlation

mola• 2 years ago

All of these are interesting reasons. "They're bored" tells you a lot about the societal and economical situation Etc. These artifacts are physical imprints of the "spiritual" human condition. There's a ton of meaning there.

I don't think purpose is the right word here, nor is it what being investigated.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

And I think we might underestimate amount of downtime people have. Like keeping guard or watching herds of animals grazing or drinking... You could probably very well carry some tools and small figure during those times.

throwup238• 2 years ago

What people draw today is far less interesting because we have had global cross pollination via print for hundreds of years and the internet for decades. Where people draw inspiration and learn the mechanics of drawing is obvious

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.

scotty792• 2 years ago

figurines are headless and footless because they were self-portraits

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.

AlecSchueler• 2 years ago

You're assuming that because they're naked women that their purpose must be sexual.

scotty792• 2 years ago

I wouldn't call it a purpose. Just a source of inspiration and dedication.

twic2• 2 years ago

There's a particularly impressive one from Malta, although much later than many in the article, 3000 BC:

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/VAWR7KPNk-UDKw

jonah• 2 years ago

Interesting! We recently visited Parque Arqueológico Nacional de Tierradentro[1] in southern Colombia. The Hypogea remind me very much of the ones in Malta you shared. There, IIRC, they were saying they were 3,000 years old, but now online I'm seeing 600-900AD, so I'm unsure of the age, but it's neat to see a similar independently developed solution to a problem.

[1] https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/743/gallery/

twic2• 2 years ago

Oh, that's stunning!

Ancient people really did like digging holes and hanging out underground. Mind you, modern people do too.

qwerty456127• 2 years ago

However, there are also more surprising ideas, such as the suggestion that the figurines are headless and footless because they were self-portraits made by women, who sculpted what they saw. In this scenario, the exaggerated breasts, stomachs and vulvas are purely the result of a woman's eye view.

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?

shrubble• 2 years ago

Isn't there the belief that few hunter gatherers were overweight because of the continual need to move and do things to have enough food? So what would an overweight, meaning very well-fed, woman mean in such a society?

goda90• 2 years ago

I think it's more likely hunter-gatherers that live in seasonal climates would be skinnier in the spring and fatter in the fall. Lots of fat would mean it was a really good summer and winter probably won't be as difficult.

carrozo• 2 years ago

“ancient paleolithic venus statues were likely made by women who were examining their own bodies and sculpting them from their own first person POV, rather than, as previously assumed, exaggerated features from an outside perspective.”

From this tweet with photos for reference:

https://x.com/na74362408/status/1559314219295805440?s=46

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 2 years ago

I accept that the angles might be similar to a lying down position, but, especially the back, I don’t think your head is flexible enough for you to see that yourself.

It probably wasn’t the women examining their own bodies, but a sculptor examining the bodies of women lying down.

andrewflnr• 2 years ago

I like this theory because it allows for convergent evolution in their shapes, which makes a much more compelling explanation for their longevity than even finding and replicating them at habitation sites, much less cultural transmission over tens of thousands of years.

sorokod• 2 years ago

Wouldn't that perspective affect how arms and hands are depicted? Also, worth saying something why the looks of other females in the group are not relevant.

every• 2 years ago

These seem from hunter/gatherers with a cycle of feast/famine in a harsh climate. Those who could most efficiently store energy in fat would be most likely to survive the cycle. And undoubtedly both infant and maternal mortality would be high. Fecundity might be both a valued individual and group trait. One or more of these traits might be in the designs of these figurines. Possibly they are talismans...

GaggiX• 2 years ago

Though more recent artworks – including those generated by artificial intelligence – are sometimes biased towards men, in the Stone Age women were centre-stage.

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.

golergka• 2 years ago

Is there a reason that the most obvious explanation is almost never suggested?

Its porn.

stargazer-3• 2 years ago

It is mentioned in the linked article.

zingababba• 2 years ago

Depends highly on the individual/tribe too. One tribe's spiritual totem is another tribe's spanking material.

contingencies• 2 years ago

Random hypotheses: ice-queen lesbian dildo cult, she-shamanic fertility tool with potential for ritual insertion, leadership or speaking token in pre-historic matrilineal societies (we learned in the 20th century that many early and mobile societies were in fact matrilineal and patrilineal societies only came to dominate after "civilization" ~= settled expansionist warmongering).

rhelz• 2 years ago

The article mentions the remarkable stability in form these figurines had, but towards the end, they started variating in an interesting way, and perhaps this variation can give us clues as to what these figurines meant.

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.

The 160-year mystery of Europe's Ice Age 'queens'

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