35000-year-old 'erotic' female sculpture rewrites mankind's artistic history

London, May 14 (ANI): A 35,000-year-old prehistoric sculpture of a sexually suggestive female form has been unearthed in Germany - a finding which is believed to be mankind's earliest artistic attempt to represent itself.

The ivory figure, carved out of a mammoth tusk, has prominent breasts and buttocks.

The Hohle Fels Venus was discovered in southwestern Germany.

Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tubingen said that the discovery should radically change people's thinking about Palaeolithic art.

According to Paul Mellars, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK2, the Venus figurine "were recovered in association with characteristic stone, bone and ivory tools belonging to a period, the Aurignacian, that represents the earliest settlement of Europe by fully anatomically and genetically modern human populations, and which saw the simultaneous demise of the preceding Neanderthals."

"And the figure is explicitly - and blatantly - that of a woman, with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs) that by twenty-first-century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic," Nature magazine quoted Mellars as saying. (ANI)