That’s generally not the case with similar objects in recent primitive societies. They are not carried around by individuals, but generally confined to some sacred place where they they may be brought out on occasion. Their function is definitely not spank material, and there’s no reason that these should be either. It would be a mistake to project our own attitudes about sex on to such societies.
I was offering a possible alternative. Your earlier post said that “fertility symbol = porn”, but that is simply not true. It might be sometimes, but it needn’t be all the time.
The simple matter is that we don’t know what they were used for, and so we should consider the various possibilities and not lock ourselves into one and only one use.
Actually, as I said, it almost never is in recent primitive societies.
It’s worth interjecting that sexual selection can produce odd results, the classic example being the peacock tail, even in species without extensive culture. So there may be extreme fluctuations in what body type is seen as ideal or sexually desirable, unrelated to prima facie health or fecundity.
Here is an anthropologist who argues that the “Venus” statuettes may indeed have been porn:
And to be fair, one that disagrees:
Also discussed on this board four years ago:
Colibri, what recent primitive societies are you referring to that have produced similar art objects?
–Mark
Nice one :), but I disagree. Realistic means “like real”, not “for real”. A representation of something doesn’t have to be exactly like the original to be realistic.
For the record, some figurines, including Willendorf, were covered in red ochre which usually signifies a religious or ritual purpose.
That’s kind of a circular argument. When anthropologists don’t know the purpose of an artifact, the default explanation is it’s religious or ritual. We obviously don’t know all the purposes for which red ochre was used, nor is it reasonable to assume that it had only purpose in hundreds of different cultures over tens of thousands of years. Yes, it was sometimes used in funerary settings, but the fact that modern morticians apply make-up to corpses doesn’t imply that make-up has no other function in our society. This kind of reasoning leads to Motel of the Mysteries type of explanations.
–Mark
Given the subject-matter and the fact that our OP has not come back, I’d be inclined to assume he meant to spell it “evilution.” 
That should have read “only ONE purpose”.
Also, I’ll note that red ochre is known to have been used as mundane make-up in ancient Egypt. And wiki’s article on ochre quotes Leroi-Gourhan as saying that ochre was used by Aurignacians “for decorative purposes in every phase of their domestic life”.
–Mark
What I’m objecting to is not that the statues were highly sexualized, but the idea that they were carried around by guys as something to masturbate to, like a copy of a porn magazine.
While we’re at it, some other things about evelution have been bothering our potential new VPOTUS, Mike Pence:
It’s only a theory, even Darwin said so.
It’s not supported by the fossil record.
It has been taught in schools as fact ever since the Scopes trial.
For 77 years scientists thought evolution was a linear process, but USA today just broke the news that it’s not; so scientists are probably wrong about everything else.
p.s. Go I.D.! Also, teach the controversy.
Those decorative purposes could also have ritualistic or symbolic meaning. But I’m not arguing that there’s a definitive explanation for the purposes of red ochre or Venus figurines. And archeologists as a whole don’t either on the inconclusive evidence they have so far. It’s pretty clear that the best they can do is make somewhat educated guesses. For all we really know, they might have been the world’s first anatomically correct dolls.
By the way, what was the question in the OP again?
That last phrase is a euphemism for “Cro-Magnon harlots reddened their cheeks with ochre to attract males.”
Quoting from the Science cite upthread
Wow! :eek: The stupidity is strong with possible V.P. Mike Pence.
Well, it is anatomically correct. And interestingly enough, she shaved too… must have been painful with a flint knife.
It could be porn in the modern sense as a masturbation aid. It could be porn in the sense of encouraging young couples to produce babies. It could have been believed to have magical properties to make young women fertile. We can’t tell with something that old. But as pointed out ‘fertility symbol’ is not only a code word for porn. This thread just shows Dopers don’t have enough to argue about.
Yes, we do!
Here’s the thing- evolution isn’t a directed process. It is, however, the accumulation of millions of little decisions and happenings over a very long time frame. These decisions do one thing in a handful of ways. The one thing they do is increase or decrease individuals’ likelihood of producing offspring. They do this by either making them more likely to live to breeding age, more likely to do the nasty with other creatures of their species, or they make it more likely for them to produce more offspring.
An example: When humans migrated out of Africa and into Europe, they were living somewhere without nearly as much sunlight. So they weren’t getting enough vitiamin D relative to what they got in Africa. Natural genetic variation was such that some individuals were born with lighter skin, which allows them to produce more vitamin D from the lesser sunlight that was available. Wham- light-skinned people are healthier- my guess (IANA geneticist or anthropologist) is that light-skinned kids survived better, so there were more light-skinned kids running around, and they hooked up, and either had lighter-skinned kids who did even better, or just upped the number of light-skinned kids until the next mutation made a handful of even lighter-skinned children.
It’s the same *exact *process we use to breed dogs, plants, etc… except that the the selection is based on survival, not people selecting based on desired traits.
Either way, we people descended from Northern Europeans ended up this lovely pasty-white shade which is very good at producing vitamin D from cloudy and not-particularly sunny climes, while people in Africa and other sunny places went the opposite direction and became darker, with more melanin, because that was advantageous.
So to answer your question in a roundabout way, it’s very likely that the suite of genes that cause us to get fat, and continue to be hungry, etc… were very advantageous in our distant past, when food supplies were not nearly so stable, and the ability to fatten up in good times easily may have meant the difference between life and death.
In other words, the ability that we have to get fat and stay fat is because our distant ancestors who had that ability were the ones who lived, while the ones who didn’t have that ability died of starvation.
A trait that enhances survival will become the norm. A faster, smarter wolf will catch more prey, so I would assume over time wolves would become faster and smarter. Now the prey would also become faster and smarter since those would be the ones to escape the wolves. Does that mean the ancestors of the wolves (and also their prey) , hundreds of generations ago were slow as turtles and pretty dumb?