You mean evilution, heathen! 
The highlighted premise is wildly improbable if not unknowable anthropologically, culturally, psychological, “aesthetically,” let alone its unsupportability, as far as I’m aware, in empirical and archaeological method.
- Note to self: send Esox Lucius pm that I think this means nothing as disrespect to him or all his other posts or quality thereof *
Venus of Willendorf … now we know what they used before they invented paper sacks.
I think it’s rather obviously true. An artist wouldn’t know what an obese woman looked like unless there were real-life models available. And the statue is an accurate representation of the fat distribution on a real obese woman, although some other features are stylized. This is not to say that primitive art doesn’t sometimes depict imaginary beings, but the fact that this is such an accurate depiction argues that it is based on reality.
That’s an impressive mouthful.
What Colibri said, but since your post was for me, I’ll still ask: how did the carver know what obese women looked like if none existed?
I think it’s a natural reaction to be surprised or even dumbfounded that such obesity could exist among Stone Age hunter/gatherers and their physically demanding way of life. I was in the dumbfounded camp when I first learned of the Venus of Willendorf. But there she is in all her glory. The premise that obese women existed back then, probably with the help of other tribal members, is a lot more plausible than a carver imagining them for some reason and getting it spot on.
To be fair, all it really indicates is that there existed at least one such woman, for some amount of time. It could be that the model was only that fat for one summer, when the game was particularly abundant, the hunters were particularly skilled and lucky, the harvests were particularly rich, and the rival neighboring tribe had just been driven away-- and even then, even though everyone in the tribe was packing on the pounds, it was only the chief’s wife who got quite that fat.
Careful. Not every surviving adaptation needs to be beneficial. It just needs to be NOT sufficiently un-beneficial as to impact passing one’s genes on to the next generation.
Given that such figures occur across much of Europe from the Pyrenees to Slovakia and over a period of 20,000 years, it’s likely that more than one particular woman was the model.
Or, she was one well-travelled, very long lived woman! Which might explain the adaptive advantage of the extra weight.
How do we know this? Exaggeration of the female form is hardly unheard of among artists. Is it supposed that Aurignacian(*) man lacked imagination?
(* - Some Venus statuettes that were, well, “statuesque” were undisputedly older than the Gravettian.)
But the point is that usually, exaggerations of the human form aren’t accurate. If you take a woman with large-but-reasonably-so breasts, for instance, and extrapolate the breasts larger, you won’t end up with a realistic picture of a woman with genuinely extraordinarily large breasts.
These were probably fertility symbols, likely representing women who have had multiple children. I can’t understand the argument, does someone think ancient people couldn’t get fat?
I think your example shows exactly why it might be reasonable to think that the Venus figures are based draw on actual models. Your example is essentially imaginary (although women with such proportions do occasionally exist). The Venus figures are generally accurate rather than imaginary depictions of obese women.
We don’t know for sure. It’s just the most likely explanation, IMO. And it in no way presumes that they lacked imagination, no more than the realistic statues of ancient Greeks and Renaissance Italians imply that they lacked imagination.
Do note that “fertility symbol” is just an anthropological code word for “porn”.
And the statues of ancient Greece and the Renaissance are only “realistic” in a certain sense of the word. Realistically, most people don’t look like that.
True in general. But in the specific case of the evolution of dietary intake, we can absolutely say that there’s positive selection, and not just neutral genetic drift. After all, every animal that I’m aware of has a deeply conserved network of signaling mechanisms that regulate dietary intake and energy expenditure.
Since biology always has exceptions, I welcome the inevitable counter-example of how some extremely weird and obscure critter lacks, say, insulin-like signaling pathways.
Building up fat from food intake greater than immediate needs is a beneficial adaptation. It prevents starvation during times of short food supply. It’s an absolute necessity for many animals in their environment, and beneficial to the rest because environments don’t supply food steadily as needed. Mammals in particular require fat reserves to survive, unlike reptiles we can’t just lie still and conserve energy waiting for the meal. Getting fat is clearly a positive and beneficial adaptation. In this modern world it may shorten our lifespans but doesn’t seem to have any effect on reproduction.
Is it? We’re talking about people who are us, so one would assume they knew menstruation = able to bear children and that “not enough fat” = no menstruation. Our pre-historic grandfathers didn’t need to, uhm, you-know, while admiring the statue. Instead it could have been carried as a charm to help ensure fertility in the group.
And therefore, when they were carrying around depictions of naked women who met their ideal, we can probably assume that they were doing so for the same reason that we do.
It could have been indeed. But how can we be certain that some caveman or -men didn’t jerk off to this particular statuette? Regardless if this was it’s original purpose or not. Remember there was no Playboy back then, let alone streaming video …