We don’t have a clue what the “Venus” figures were for?
Tell me: If someone nowadays is producing depictions of naked women with exaggerated sexual characteristics, what are they for? And is there any reason that the purpose would be any different a few thousand years ago? People are people.
Art? Porn? Advertising? Political statement? Religious Iconography?
No one reason, is my point.
You say this like you have one particular purpose in mind. Do you mean porn? Then say porn.
What makes you think people millennia ago had the same thing for nudity we do? Art history shows us non-sexual nudity has been the norm at various periods, and not at others.
They obviously didn’t have the same thing we do, because most people nowadays don’t find the Venus of Wilendorf shape sexy. But I’m sure they had some sort of porn.
The prehistoric Venus figurines are obviously religious icons, though the term “religious” applied to Paleolithic man may be ill-defined. The consistency of the statues’ shapes (as well as the careful workmanship) should make it clear they had some function beyond “porn.” :smack:
I own a copy of Language of the Goddesses by Marija Gimbutas herself. (I’d quote some relevant passages … but unfortunately my book collection is in such disarray that just finding the book would be a project! :mad: )
Possibly. We don’t really have any unambiguous porn from before the Fertile Crescent civilizations, AFAIK. The mindset for it might be a result of civilization, for all we know.
Sorry for restarting the hijack. But…
No. The figurine is FAT, not (or not just) pregnant. A thin pregnant woman has a distinctive shape; this figurine displays anatomically correct obesity.
My point in bring up her shape was not to discuss purpose or porn, but to point out that the figure made by and for a nomadic group displays a level of obesity inconsistent with our modern concept of hunter-gatherer nomadic societies. This suggests that in some locales, before agricultural societies pushed HG to the less productive lands, it was possible that some HG societies were sufficiently sedentary and lived in sufficiently bountiful conditions, it appears, that some members of the group could become obese enough that it suggests they were limited in mobility. I can’t imagine a 300-lb woman living a nomadic lifestyle, but this suggests the artist had seen one close to that condition. (and she didn’t need feet, ha ha)
Steatopygian Khoisan women had no problem maintaining a nomadic lifestyle.
No, she’s beyond steatopygian - she has full-bodied fatness up and down, including huge… tracts of land.
The stomach overflows on the sides as large love handles; not a pregnancy characteristic. She even has fat rolls around the vulva. As I keep saying, this is too true-to-life to be fanciful - it appears to be based on reality.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but Marija Gimbutas was discredited decades ago, and her ‘goddess’ theories are not, and have never been, accepted by serious scientists and academics.
RationalWiki:
I’m imagining someone stumbling onto a store of Smokey the Bear posters in the far distant future. They might well recognize it’s a bear wearing a hat but putting together that it means don’t start forest fires would be a bit of a stretch.
Further, stumbling on some Smokey the Bear posters in New York and a Clovis-age petroglyph of a bear in Washington State and assuming that both were made by the same culture for the same reason.
Obvious some kind of Earth Bear God. Shovel as a symbol of crafting the mighty earthworks that date from that period. The hat must be a symbol of authority not unlike the Egyptian Uraeus.
I’m not “invested” in all of Gimbutas’ theories — I can’t even be bothered to hunt down her book, which is somewhere within 20 yards of me as I type! — but IIUC she was also ridiculed for her Kurgan hypothesis of I-E origin which is now accepted by all right-minded thinkers.
Of course, the details of Venus figurines will vary in time and space; the changes in material culture are dizzying and lead to several dozens of named prehistoric cultures in Europe alone. But IMHO it is absurd to imagine these icons as universal porn, rather than some sort of “religious” motif.
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is something I see all too often in the “soft” sciences. Julian Jaynes (who still has expert adherents today) went too far in some of his generalizations? “All his theories should therefore be rejected.” Even the revolutionary theories of SDMB’s own Lynne Kelly, acclaimed by top archaeologists, were described on this very board as “woo.”
Thanks at least for not inserting an “all” before the “serious.” In a previous debate on another topic I started naming PhD’s that took “my” side and indignant Dopers were outraged that I didn’t know “all” meant “most.” 
I would say quite the opposite. We know that all humans, all over the world, make porn, and when modern humans create depictions of naked women, that’s usually why. On the other hand, while all human populations, all over the world, have religions, it’s mostly not the same religions, with the same symbols or objects of veneration. It would take extraordinary evidence to rule out the simple explanation of porn.
You mean the revolutionary theory that [del]set the scientific world on fire[/del] sank without a ripple?
I’ve never seen Bushman porn. Is there pre-colonial Pacific Islander porn?
There’s probably nearly as many art nudes as there are porn nudes.
So your criticism is not that the theory isn’t plausible and reasonable (it has after all been peer-reviewed and published by Cambridge University Press), but rather that it isn’t sensational or earth-shattering enough for you?
In that case, I suppose you can sneer at 99.9% of all scholarly books and papers.
It is, however, an interesting theory. We know that similar memory techniques are currently used by several different indigenous cultures around the world. If they were also used in the past, they may explain certain features of paleolithic structures and artifacts.
We know that several different cultures tell stories as a device to remember geography. We don’t know cultures that modify geography as a device to remember stories. The “theory” is pure loony-tunes.
When I first saw the Venus, my guess was “child’s doll”. But a friend who’s an amateur archeologist said the Venus figurines represent a huge amount of labor, and were thus probably too valuable to be a child’s play thing. So my next guess is porn.
No, this is not what Lynne Kelly is saying.
My summary:
And particularly:
e.g.
Lynne Kelly gives a large number of such examples, with citations to published papers.
4. In many cultures this body of knowledge is so large that it takes years of dedicated effort to learn. This results in a special caste of people whose function it is to preserve the knowledge, while most people only memorise a smaller amount of everyday knowledge.
It is a category mistake to think that the primary function of songs, dances, rituals, ritual objects and places, and the ‘priestly’ caste is religion and worship. A small part of it may indeed be religion and worship, but the great bulk of it is about preserving detailed knowledge and facts.
It is not a big leap to connect, say, the stone posts at Gobekli Tepe, with North American totem poles and other such objects in other cultures, and guess that they may have served a similar purpose.
Usually regular gatherings are held, which in Australia may involve thousands of people, to refresh and remember the songs, dances, etc. which encode the knowledge of the culture. These gatherings are held at places where knowledge is encoded in features of the landscape.
We can theorise that larger, more settled and sophisticated cultures may have created purpose-built ‘landscape objects’ such as stone circles and places like Gobekli Tepe for such gatherings.