Femmes, naissance de l'homme: Icônes de la préhistoire

"Yes. It’s only about Venuses. It’s also a very interesting point of view. So there are three or four periods of Venuses from this Paleolithic period. With this book, it’s possible to grasp the differences between them in terms of shape, form, maybe symbolical explanation, the material the Venuses were made off, where they came from. Also, the resemblances when they are from the same period, but are found in very distant places. It tells you something about the dispersal of these prehistoric groups. The book helps us to understand prehistoric culture through the art. For example, at Renancourt in France, near Amiens, they found the same figurine as one in Vienna, from Willendorf. It’s not completely the same, but the body of the woman is sculpted in the same way, with big breasts and a very generous figure and wearing a hat. There’s quite a big distance between Vienna and Amiens, more than a thousand kilometres. It tells you how this ancient culture evolved and spread all over Europe. Yes, the Venuses are small sculptures of a woman’s body. The oldest one that’s been found in Europe was in Germany, near the border with Switzerland, the Venus of Hohle Fels. It’s about 40,000 years old. After that, there are many more. So they date from the starting point of the Upper Paleolithic and go on until the end, but the shapes are always changing. Sometimes women are represented with very generous forms, with big breasts and bottoms. Sometimes they’re thin, just a few lines in a drawing. It makes you question what these women really looked like. Are these Venuses a portrait of these prehistoric women? Or are they some kind of symbolic way of representing them? We asked a paleoanthropologist what the bodies of prehistoric women found in the ground were like because the bones can tell us about their muscles and weight and also the strength of these women. The portrait that the bones give is not the same as the Venuses. So it seems that those Venuses are more symbolical representations of the power of women—maybe it’s about fertility or an amulet for luck. Or they’re just a symbolical way of thinking about femininity or maybe even a broader belief in some kind of cosmogony, a way of representing the world in its entirety. But the Venuses are not exact portraits. Yes, that’s what the skeletons say. That’s logical, if you think about hunter-gatherers. Even if they don’t move from place to place every day, they have a very, very physical everyday life. You’re gathering plants or hunting or preparing the skins of animals or making objects. You also carry your baby. They say that the territory hunter-gatherers moved in through a season was around 30 kilometres squared, so it’s quite a large territory. You’re searching for wood, for stone, for ochre to adorn your skin. It gives you an idea of how physical those times were. You have to use your muscles a lot. So the very generous forms of the Venuses doesn’t seem to fit with the hunter-gatherer way of living."