The Venus of Willendorf

The above picture is an image of a small figure found in Germany in 1908. She is only about four inches high, carved of stone, and she is between 25,000 and 20,000 years old. She had no facial features, and her body is a curved mass of spheres -- breasts, belly, hips, thighs, head. No one really knows why she was created, nor is there any clue to the identity of the artist who created her. Most archaeologists and historians classify her as a religious artifact (as they are wont to do when an object's purpose isn't clear). Needless to say, her very existence begs innumerable questions.

Is this a portrait of Neolithic woman?

Who carved it? Why? Is there anything the figure could tell us about Neolithic women? If so, what?

These answers, like so much of Stone Age life, remain an enigma. But the jigsaw pieces of evidence about how humans lived 20,000 years ago and more provide an intriguing glimpse into our ancestors' daily lives.

Concrete evidence aside for a moment, we can begin with basic biology. Homo sapiens has had the same biological needs and has done the same biological things for several million years. Our primary drive, like every other organism on the planet, has been to produce more of our own kind; on a basic level, everything else that we do as a species is done with the ultimate goal of passing on our genes to the next generation. We may not know it, and we may well sometimes do things that seemingly contradict that drive for multigenerational survival, but it's what drives us nonetheless. We also have different levels of need -- our basic physical needs must be effectively met before we can satisfy our psychological needs. Human culture and ways of living are all complex, but take it as read: they're based on sex.

Being mammals, we bear live young, and nurse them at the breast. And who has the breasts? Who bears the young? Women. Seems obvious. And it is, because we've done it for millions of years. And the way breastfeeding is set up, our young are intimately dependent on their mothers for the first five or six years of life. Human children literally cannot stray far from the breast, or they will die. And who is that breast attached to? Mother.

What does this have to do with Neolithic womankind? A lot more than you might think, actually. It provides a biological framework for the division of human labor, around which we can build a possible picture of Neolithic life. Given that women have always had their kids in tow, there will be certain things that women with children are unable to do. For instance, I don't think it likely than many Neolithic women hunted, because children just aren't practical on a hunt. They're noisy, smelly (from an animal's POV), and they weigh a lot. Until they've learned the nuances of hunting, they tend to do things like startle your prey, and weigh you down if you're trying to escape from a predator yourself. It doesn't mean that women aren't capable of hunting, and never were -- it just means that I don't think the labor would have divided up that way.

So what did people need to do? Well, they needed to eat. It is known that Stone Age people hunted and gathered their food. It seems likely that the better activity for women with children would be gathering, since young children could stay with their mothers, and slightly older children could help out. Food preparation could also be done with children in tow -- the removal of poisonous plant parts, or bones from meat, or the shells from shellfish. The cooking and storing of food could also be done with kids around. So could the creation of vessels in which to cook and store said food. Was it a woman who wove the first basket? Was it a woman who created the first pot?

Other activities that can be done with kids around are the creation of clothing, and the preparation of medicines. The string skirts which illustrate the backs of certain Venus figures suggest that people knew how to make string. They might even have known how to spin using a drop spindle of some sort.

Cave painting is another child-friendly activity. Indeed, in many caves, beautiful illustrations of wild animals, created with much sophistication and attention to detail, are accompanied by simpler figures and scribbles which may be the Stone Age version of children's fingerpainting. If the children are there, would it not be likely that the women are also? Of the handprints and hand-stencils left behind by the artists, how many of them are women's handprints?

The fact that people were able to take the time to make such beautiful paintings, many of them hidden deep in the caves in which they lived, suggests that Stone Age humans had some amount of free time, because you can't make a lovely painting if you're more concerned about where your next meal is coming from. What might women have done during their free time? Babies are not awake 24 hours a day; did women relax during their infants' naps? A version of Mancala has recently been found that is some 15,000 years old; did a woman's hand once hold the pieces during a moment of recreation? And what role did women hold in a spiritual or religious sense?

At Qafzeh in Israel, a woman was found in a pit grave dug from the floor of the cave she likely lived in. She was about 20 years old; at her feet was the body of a 6-year-old child (presumably, her own). Someone took the time and trouble to dig that grave for her, and bury her with that child. Surely this isn't done for someone who is unimportant to their group. That woman mattered to someone. 100,000 years ago, she mattered.

Women were important enough to their communities for artists to carve rounded images of them, images we now call "Venus figures" and declare to be religious artifacts. Surely there is some sort of powerful meaning behind them -- but what?