Fertility and childbearing were hugely important to the earliest humans. The procreation of the species is not merely a biological imperative, but vital to the socio-cultural fabric of our societies. This magical moment in the lives of human beings, the comingling of masculine and feminine to create a new living being, was rightly seen as something mystical, or even religious, among our early ancestors. The process of childbirth, painful and risky, required magico-medical intervention. In the absence of analgesics, psychosomatic approaches were often used, even though the academic concept did not exist at the time. Without knowing what they were doing, ancient peoples used their own rituals to transfer the pain experienced by mothers onto other objects or spirits. This is potentially one such use of the so-called ‘Venus’ figures, created from some 26,000 years Before Present, right up until the late Neolithic around 4000 BC. These sculptures, the earliest figural representations of human beings ever created, must have held some important function for the societies which created them. Initially hunter-gatherers, Palaeolithic and later Neolithic humans could ill-afford the time and energy expended on art. With the focus on feeding themselves and their families, early humans must have considered these figures of central importance to have bothered with them in the first place. Fortunately, for many early humans, the so-called Neolithic Revolution came to the rescue. Humans were able, for the first time, to cultivate plants and to herd animals, relieving some of the food pressures, and enabled an explosion of art. ‘Venus’ figures were one of the early beneficiaries.

This remarkable ‘Venus’ figure is likely of an early type. The form is very akin to the earliest of all Palaeolithic sculptures, the Venus of Hohe Fels (produced in Germany around 26,000 yBP) and the so-called Willendorf Venus, now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. The physique is plump and voluptuous, with oversized hips and huge pendulous breasts. While she is presented with the hourglass figure of later examples, the contrast between hips and bust on the one hand, and the waist on the other, is much less pronounced. Instead of having her arms crossed across her belly as in other later examples, the short and programmatic arms are instead splayed to the side, as though presenting her breasts to the viewer. The head is small, and almost perfectly round, and the feet are marked with incised lines which could represent fat rolls around the ankles, or else are perhaps symbolic indications of the feet themselves. In this regard, the figure is remarkably close to larger and more developed figures of white marmoric stone, also produced in the early urban settlements of Çatalhöyük (settled around 7500 BC).

Early Anatolia, from whence this figure comes, was a hive of activity for early humans. An oasis of fertile plains between the rapid desertification of North Africa and the often cold and unpleasant climate of Europe, the Near East was what archaeologists called the ‘Cradle of Civilisation’, the region in which human beings first settled into cities, learned to write, invented the wheel, developed agriculture, and began organised religion. Anatolia, long thought of as slightly late to the party, was in fact one of the engines of this change. The remarkable site of Göbekli Tepe, sometimes compared to the United Kingdom’s Stonehenge, was perhaps the earliest site of organised religion. It is so early – founded around 9500 BC – that it has led archaeologists to re-assess the early chronology of human development. The traditional story was that human beings first learned to farm, which caused them to settle in permanent locations rather than moving around with the herds. From these settled villages, hierarchical social organisation arose, and from that, semi-organised religion. Instead, Göbekli Tepe indicates that, in Anatolia at least, it was the need to come together at permanent sites for proto-religious ceremonies that drove the first human settlements; the need to feed permanent populations led to the development of farming and husbandry.