"All place an emphasis on sexual attributes and lack emphasis on the legs, arms, face and head, made all the more noticeable in this case because a carefully carved, polished ring -- suggesting that the figurine was once suspended as a pendant -- exists in place of a head," he said. The carver, who painstaking shaped the object out of a mammoth tusk, included fingers on the hands and even a navel. Deeply incised horizontal lines, which Conard thinks might have represented clothing or straps, were cut over the bulging abdomen. Paul Mellars, a University of Cambridge archaeologist who is currently at Stony Brook University's Turkana Basin Institute, wrote a commentary about the Venus that appears in the same issue of Nature. Mellars told Discovery News that he fully agrees with Conard's analysis of the object, which he described as "remarkable" and "an archaeological discovery of considerable significance." "It's at least as old as the world's oldest cave art," Mellars said, adding that viewers "can't avoid being struck by its very sexually explicit depiction of a woman. The breasts really jump out at you." "I assume it was a guy who carved it, perhaps representing his girlfriend," he added. "Paleolithic Playboy? We just don't know how it was used at this point, but the object's size meant it fit well in someone's hand." Related Links: |
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