University of Rochester

Rochester Review
July-August 2009
Vol. 71, No. 6

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Finding a New ‘Venus’ Team led by Nicholas Conard ’83, ’86 (MS) discovers oldest known 3-D representation of the female form.

Archaeologist and paleoanthropologist Nicholas Conard ’83, ’86 (MS) had been leading a fruitful expedition for a dozen years in the Hohle Fels Cave near the southern German city of Ulm, when his team uncovered its most significant discovery so far: a 6-centimeter tall female figurine carved from mammoth ivory.

According to carbon dating, the piece was created about 35,000 years ago, making it the oldest known three-dimensional human representation and the earliest such depiction of the female form.

Conard, who teaches at Germany’s University of Tübingen, reported his findings in a May issue of the journal Nature. “This discovery,” he wrote, “radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Paleolithic art.”

While similar artifacts, known as Venus figurines, have been discovered from many sites across Europe, the Hohle Fels Venus, as the figurine is called, is significant because it was crafted at least 5,000 years earlier and “appears to be the prototype for the later depictions,” Conard says.

Until his team discovered the figurine last September, “female imagery was entirely unknown” among the artistic artifacts from that stretch of the Paleolithic era, Conard says.

The meaning of the female imagery is open to debate. With schematic arms and legs and no head, the figurine has a small ring, suggesting it may have been worn as a pendant.

Given its exaggerated sexual characteristics, Conard suspects the figurine was a symbolic representation of female fertility.

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)