Art or Bust: The oldest sculpture ever discovered is a 36,000 year old woman with really big breasts. Is anyone surprised?

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

ID_NC_MEIS_STATU_AP_001 Dubbed the “Venus of Hohle Fels” she is only about 6 centimeters tall. Her most prominent feature is the aforementioned rack, though her shapely gams come in a close second. This has led to a certain amount of snickering. The oldest sculpture in the world is basically a pair of breasts that hung on a string from some cave person's neck. As The Economist opined, “this discovery adds to the evidence that human thinking—or male thinking, at least—has hardly changed since the species evolved.”

The more uptight among us—i.e. the scientists—are trying to keep it clean. Professor Nicholas Conard from Tübingen University danced gingerly around the topic, noting to the BBC that, “We project our ideas of today on to this image from 40,000 years ago. I think there are good reasons to emphasize sexual interpretations, but we really don't know whether it is coming from a more male or a more female perspective. We don't know very much about how the artifact was used.” Others have retreated to the relatively safe territory of cognitive and cultural development. Paul Mellars, an archeologist at Cambridge, in his commentary on the sculpture for Nature, wrote “How far this ‘symbolic explosion’ [the emergence of representational art like the Venus] associated with the origins and dispersal of our species reflects a major, mutation-driven reorganization in the cognitive capacities of the human brain — perhaps associated with a similar leap forward in the complexity of language — remains a fascinating and contentious issue.”

I'm not sure the two points (the sex and the cognitive development) are really all that different.

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