She’s beautiful and German. She’s also naked, with very large breasts, and she isn’t wearing any underwear — in fact, she’s posing almost obscenely, and has rather prominent labia in view. She’s also 35,000 years old and has no head.

A few other interesting details: she doesn’t seem to be entirely naked— there are markings like bands and hatchmarks that are suggestive of some kind of clothing. More attention was paid to carving the hands, which have 5 and 4 fingers marked out, than to the head, which is nonexistent. In its place, there is a well-polished, carved loop, suggesting that she was probabl worn as a pendant. She’s also carved out of something you can’t get anymore, mammoth ivory.

These Venus figurines have been found in many places in Europe, but this is the oldest one yet discovered. You have to wonder what they were for. Crude stone-age porn, whittled out by horny, bored mammoth hunters? Fertility fetishes worn by women trying to get pregnant? Symbols of some complicated body of religious belief now completely lost to us? Imagine if, tens of thousands of years from now, archaeologists who have lost all records of our civilization were digging around in Europe and kept unearthing one of our common kinds of statuary—figures of a tormented dead man, arms outstretched, strange wounds carved into hands, feet, and side. It would probably make about as much sense as these fascinating Venus symbols.

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Conard NJ (2009) A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in Southwestern Germany. Nature 459:248-252.