«--Previous Post | Blog Index | Next Post--»

Ancient Carvings of Nude Females Promote Wild Scientific ASSumptions

Okay, so maybe carvings of female figurines 15,000 years old reveal the preferred body shape for women was curvy with prominent buttocks. Or maybe, as the social anthropologist says, these were spiritual images (can’t they be the same thing?). But, jaysus, does anyone else ever get annoyed that no one ever even once seems to consider the possibility that maybe women carved these things?

From New Scientist magazine:

Romuald Schild of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and colleagues have uncovered 30 flint female figurines from an ancient hunting site near the village of Wilczyce in central Poland. Hunter-gatherer men whittled these voluptuous female figures in their spare time.

Preserved in ice, the figurines were part of a haul of over 10,000 artifacts, including animal bones, beads made from Arctic fox teeth, and bone needles. The site is thought to have been an autumn or winter camp for a hunter-gatherer tribe.

All of the figurines were headless and had hugely exaggerated buttocks. Perhaps strangely, given their allure today, few of the figures had breasts.

This bottom-heavy shape ties in with northern European stone carvings and cave engravings of women from a similar period.

However, the figurines may have expressed more than just men's desires. "It is hard to say if this body shape was a social preference or if it represented a spiritual image," says Nanneke Redclift, a social anthropologist at University College London.

Posted by Julia Whitty on 03/12/07 at 11:02 AM | Comments (2) | Email | Print

 facebook