The widespread depiction of the female form in Palaeolithic art also needs some explanation and comment. There are the so-called ‘Venus pebbles’, inscribed stones, which appear to show breasts and skirts, found in Korea and dated to 12,165 BP; there is the ‘Venus of Galgenberg’, found near Krems in Lower Austria, showing a large-breasted woman who appears to be dancing, and dated to 31,000 years ago; most important of all there are the ‘Venus figurines’, found in a shallow arc stretching from France to Siberia, the majority of which belong to the Gravettian period – around 25,000 years ago. There has been, inevitably perhaps, much controversy about these figures. Many of them (but by no means all) are buxom, with large breasts and bellies, possibly indicating they are pregnant. Many (but not all) have distended vulvas, indicating they are about to give birth. Many (but not all) are naked. Many (but not all) lack faces but show elaborate coiffures. Many (but not all) are incomplete, lacking feet or arms, as if the creator had been intent on rendering only the sexual characteristics of these figures. Some, but not all, were originally covered in red ochre – was that meant to symbolise (menstrual) blood? Some critics, such as the archaeologist Paul Bahn, have argued that we should be careful in reading too much sex into these figures, that it tells us more about modern palaeontologists than it does about ancient humans. Nevertheless, other early art works do suggest sexual themes. There is a natural cavity in the Cougnac cave at Quercy in France which suggests (to the modern eye) the shape of a vulva, a similarity which appears to have been apparent also to ancient man, for they stained the cave with red ochre ‘to symbolise the menstrual flow’.64 Among the images found in 1980 in the Ignateva cave in the southern Urals of Russia is a female figure with twenty-eight red dots between her legs, very likely a reference to the menstrual cycle.65 At Mal’ta, in Siberia, Soviet archaeologists discovered houses divided into two halves. In one half only objects of masculine use were found, in the other half female statuettes were located. Does this mean the homes were ritually divided according to gender?66
Whether some of these early ‘sexual images’ have been over-interpreted, it nonetheless remains true that sex is one of the main images in early art, and that the depiction of female sex organs is far more widespread than the depiction of male organs. In fact, there are no depictions of males in the Gravettian period (25,000 years ago) and this would therefore seem to support the claims of the distinguished Lithuanian archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas (discussed in detail in Chapter 3), that early humans worshipped a ‘Great Goddess’, rather than a male god. The development of such beliefs possibly had something to do with what at that time would have been the great mystery of birth, the wonder of breastfeeding, and the disturbing occurrence of menstruation. Randall White, professor of anthropology at New York University, adds the intriguing thought that these figures date from a time (and such a time must surely have existed) when early man had yet to make the link between sexual intercourse and birth. At that time, birth would have been truly miraculous, and early man may have thought that, in order to give birth, women received some spirit, say from animals (hence the animal heads). Until the link was made between sexual intercourse and birth, woman would have seemed mysterious and miraculous creatures, far more so than men.
Olga Soffer, of the University of Illinois, also points out that some of the Venus figurines appear to be wearing caps that are woven. She thinks that textiles were invented very early on: she has, she says, identified impressions of netting on fragments of clay from Upper Palaeolithic sites in Moravia and Russia that suggest the possibility of net hunting. She also believes that cordage – ropes made of plant fibres – extends back 60,000 years and helped early humans construct sailing vessels, with the aid of which they colonised Australia.67
Beads first appeared at Blombos cave in South Africa 80,000–75,000 years ago. They are common by 18,000 years ago, but their most dramatic arrival is seen towards the end of the ‘creative explosion’ in a series of burials in the 28,000-year-old site at Sungir in Russia. Randall White, the archaeologist who has studied these beads, reports on three burials – a sixty-year-old man, a small boy and a girl. The figures were adorned with, respectively, 2,936, 4,903 and 5,274 beads plus, in the case of the adult, a beaded cap with fox teeth and twenty-five mammoth-ivory bracelets. Each bead, according to experiments White carried out, would have taken between an hour and three hours to produce – 13,000–39,000 hours in total (somewhere between eighteen and fifty-four months). So the word ‘decoration’ hardly applies and we need to ask whether these beads are evidence of something more important – social distinctions, maybe, or even primitive religion. White certainly thinks social divisions were already in existence 28,000 years ago; for one thing, it is unlikely that at Sungir everyone was buried with thousands of beads that took so long to make – there would hardly have been time for real work. It is possible, therefore, that the people who were buried with beads were themselves religious figures of some kind. The differences in decoration between individuals also imply that early humans were acquiring a sense of ‘self’.68
The very presence of grave goods, of whatever kind, suggests that ancient people believed at least in the possibility of an afterlife, and this in turn would have implied a belief in supernatural beings. Anthropologists distinguish three requirements for religion: that a non-physical component of an individual can survive after death (the ‘soul’); that certain individuals within a society are particularly likely to receive direct inspiration from supernatural agencies; and that certain rituals can bring about changes in the present world.69 The beads at Sungir strongly suggest that people believed in an afterlife, though we have no way of knowing how this ‘soul’ was conceived. The remote caves decorated with so many splendid paintings were surely centres of ritual (they were lit by primitive lamps, several examples of which have been found, burning moss wicks in animal fat, another use of fire). At the caves of Les Trois-Frères in Ariège in southern France, near the Spanish border, there is what appears to be an upright human figure wearing a herbivore skin on its back, a horse’s tail and a set of antlers – in other words, a shaman. At the end of 2003 it was announced that several figures carved in mammoth ivory had been found in a cave, near Shelklingen in the Jura mountains in Bavaria. These included a Löwenmensch, a ‘lion-person’, half-man, half-animal, dating to 33,000–31,000 years ago, suggesting a shamanistic magical or religious belief system of some sophistication.