I thought the Venus statues were bulky looking because it was easier to form the clay in a more "block" shaped way. But all the Venus statues looked that way. The statue of the horse and mammoth looked very close to what they really look like. So does that mean that women back in that time were heavyset?
shareThere is scholarly controversy on this. Some scholars feel that women at that time did, in fact, look a bit like this (steatopygia is the technical term); most, however, pooh-pooh this and feel that they were just exaggerating the parts of the female body that were culturally most important.
shareThey were pregnant women...something magical, something they could and would worship. A baby comes out of a pregnant woman. Wow.
All the rest is hooey.
they were primitive sex toys.
shareThe current consensus among historians/paleontologists is that the "Venus" figurines were in fact fertility charms.
Some of the reasons for this theory:
1. The survival of the group/clan depended on having children.
2. Given what we now know about late Pleistocene diets, there would be very few, if any, women with an everyday body type like those depicted in the "Venus" figurines. A woman would only come close to looking like that when she's pregnant. The diets of nomadic hunter/gatherers, plus the sheer amount of physical labor needed to survive every day, would almost ensure that heavy/fat people were quite rare.
3. Some figurines have, instead of a head, a loop or perforation that allowed it to be worn around the neck, further evidence that these figures had some kind of magical/religious significance: i.e. wear this fertility goddess and you will have a child.
I just wish they'd stop calling them "Venus" -- these weren't works of art to be admired, but useful objects that had a practical purpose.
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Adversity does not build character. It reveals it.
Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt
There are many cultures around the world in which overweight women are considered attractive. I have first hand experience of this in North Africa. Also ancient fertility figurines exactly like these are found in many places across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. And they are all fat as hell.
Sometimes I wonder how much of our sense of aesthetic really comes from us these days, and how much is just conditioning. Look at Renaissance painting, lots of well proportioned figures; athletic men and skinny women? No, the women are neither fat nor skinny, but definitely cuddly. And those guys were aping the classical sculptors of Greece, in other words they were painting what they considered to be perfection of the human form.
Is it then not possible that these fat figurines represent a concept of health and success in a world where starvation was only one bad hunting season away? In other words, they were depicting what they considered to be perfection; some fertility goddess of the Earth that radiated health and sex with every shake of the folds in her excessively flabby body.
I think what really interests me is that palaeolithic people would have been either slim and athletic or skinny from starvation. Overweight people would have been very rare I think (perhaps some genetic cases). Despite this ancient people chose to revere fatness. This is the reverse of today in fact, where 25% of British and 33% of US citizens are officially obese, yet in those cultures skinniness is a mark of beauty.
Done with fish.