Thursday, May 14, 2009

The oldest known artistic depiction of a woman may also be the oldest known pornography.

It's this 35,000-year-old sculpture.

Paul Mellars, an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, says:

"The figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman, with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs) that by twenty-first-century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic"....
Here's a video segment about it.

So, what does this mean? It may have profound implications about the development of art and intelligence:
The oldest human art dates back much further, to between 75,000 and 95,000 years ago in Africa. But that art was abstract, and consisted of geometrical designs engraved on pieces of red iron oxide. This is the first known art to represent a woman, and possibly the first art to represent anything real at all....

The jump from abstract art to representative art ... might reflect a leap in the cognitive capacity of the human brain around this time. Some experts think that the development might have gone along with a leap in the complexity of human language.
But let's get back to the sex...
"If there's one conclusion you want to draw from this, it's that an obsession with sex goes back at least 35,000 years," [said Mellars].... "But if humans hadn’t been largely obsessed with sex they wouldn’t have survived for the first 2 million years. None of this is at all surprising."

7 comments:

Jason (the commenter) said...

If you wear it around your neck for everyone to see is it really pornography?

The only people who seem obsessed with sex are the headline writers. It says right in the article that the oldest forms of art are geometric patterns, that the oldest figurative art may instead be a half-man/half-animal drawing, and that phallus carvings were also popular around the time of this figure. But we have headline the naked woman.

Don't forget that we don't know if a man or a woman made/wore this. Maybe this was the best the artist could do. Maybe this was considered humorous. Maybe this was something people had to wear as punishment. Maybe this was just a pale imitation of the crazy sex scenes they would paint on their bodies.

The best two words from the article: "Scientists guess".

John Althouse Cohen said...

The best two words from the article: "Scientists guess".

Guessing is just part of the basic process of thinking about the world. I don't think this is particular to scientists. But I certainly hope scientists are making guesses about things, as long as they admit their uncertainty. You can't get to the right answers unless you're willing to make a bunch of wrong guesses along the way.

Ann Althouse said...

This is the oldest root of art. Our pornography doesn't reflect on it and make it pornography. It reflects on our pornography and makes it art.

John Althouse Cohen said...

I lost your antecedent.

Jason (the commenter) said...

It reflects on our pornography and makes it art.

The art/pornography divide is probably the biggest cultural argument in our society. They certainly don't rate movies based on how abstract/representational they are.

Ann Althouse said...

"I lost your antecedent."

Rewrite:

The newly discovered sculpture is the oldest root of art. Our pornography doesn't reflect on this sculpture and make the sculpture pornography. The sculpture reflects on our pornography and makes our pornography art.

There, now, are you happy? Wouldn't it be so much easier for you to simply read my mind?


John Althouse Cohen said...

John Althouse Cohen said...

ah, thanx, heh, yeah