The very earliest humans to create art, some 60,000 years Before Present, did not much focus on the human form. Their interest was much more in the animal world which surrounded them, the beasts on which they depended for food, and against which they contended for space and resources. When, in the Gravettian Period (26,000 BP), our ancestors first decided to depict humanoid forms, they chose to represent females almost exclusively. These are the so-called ‘Venus’ figurines, The earliest of these, the Venus of Hohe Fels, discovered in Germany, is emblematic of the type. Feminine curves, large breasts, rotund hips, small heads, slender legs and arms programmatically folded across the stomach, and emphasised genital organs. Their modern name derives from the first such piece to be discovered, La Vénus impudique (‘the immodest Venus’), an entirely metaphorical designation, since there was no direct connection between the figures and the Roman goddess of love and beauty, Venus. Instead, the name references femininity and sensuality, though this can only be a small part of the story. Modern archaeologists are wont to call such figures ‘fertility’ or ‘mother’ goddesses, given their emphasised organs of generation and nurturing, though this is at best only a reasonable guess applied to an under-studied and under-categorised class of archaeological find.

The female figures originating in the Palaeolithic began a long tradition of such feminine imagery which far outlasted early humans. As the Palaeolithic turned into the Neolithic, around 9000 BC (in North Africa and Europe, at least), human societies drastically changed. The so-called Neolithic Revolution, the transition of many human cultures across the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean from exclusively hunter-gatherer societies into proto-agricultural peoples, was driven by massive technological advances such as the invention of animal husbandry, the domestication of certain plant species, irrigation, deforestation, and the gathering of humans into villages. With this transition, human beings had more time for non-food related endeavours, such as the production of art and the first architecture. Despite the rapidly changing socio-cultural circumstances, the obsession – if this is not too strong a word – with the female form continued. ‘Venus’ or fertility figures were produced in ever-greater numbers and with ever-greater abstract refinement.

This ‘Venus’ figure originates in Anatolia, and is a remarkable example of the genre. Carved from a dense black stone, diorite or dioritic gneiss, even forming the basic shape would have been a challenge for the ancient artist. Executing the figure with such sensuous and flowing curves was quite a feat. The form is predictable, but no less beautiful for it: the hips are dramatically oversized, perhaps to indicate fertility and childbearing, the waist narrow, the legs straight and slender, the arms barely indicated as folded over the abdomen, where they push up two stylised breasts. The head is ovoid and flattened, with a depression at the back about the size of an adult thumb-tip. This depression, along with the fact that the figure cannot stand on its narrow legs, indicates that such a figure was meant to be held, not displayed, and would have been stored or deposited laying down. This may be evidence of early ritual involving such tactile pieces. The shape and pose both prefigure the famous later Anatolian ‘Kilia’ or ‘stargazer’ figures, a further evolution of the female effigy produced by a Cycladic-style culture in Anatolia around 3,000 years later than this figure.