[ad_1]
If you’ve ever been to a history museum, you may have seen a Venus figurine. They are made of soft stones, clay, ivory or bone and depict very voluptuous female figures. In fact, some features are so exaggerated that anthropologists often wonder whether they also represent pregnant or obese women.
Most of the statuettes of Venus were carved between 26,000 and 21,000 years ago, although some date back to at least 35,000 years ago. Researchers today interpret them as symbols of beauty and fertility, but the original meaning and purpose of these figurines is not known – they may also have served a ritual purpose, but little is known about them.
A new study examining ancient famine and ice age variations suggests the figures were indeed obese, but this represented a kind of beauty standard or ideal at the time.
Unusual art
Obesity is, for the most part, a modern problem: having too much food on hand is not something many of our ancestors could have bragged about. So what’s the deal with this kind of art?
“Some of the world’s first works of art are these mysterious figurines of overweight women from the hunter-gatherer days of the Ice Age in Europe, where you wouldn’t expect to see obesity at all,” said Richard Johnson, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine specializing in kidney disease and hypertension. “We have shown that these figurines are related to periods of extreme nutritional stress.”
About 48,000 years ago, ancient humans in Europe were going through a period called the Aurignacian. The Aurignacians, people who lived during that time, had already established themselves as a force in the biological world. They hunted reindeer, horses and mammoths with the spears and tools they made. They also fished and supplemented their diet by looking for berries, nuts and plants.
But things have taken a bad turn for them. With the onset of the Ice Age, temperatures plummeted and disaster struck. The ice caps were advancing, it was getting colder and the ancestral lifestyle could not be sustained for most populations. Some have moved south in search of warmer climates. Others took refuge in the forests, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem as they hunted and hunted for anything they could find.
It was in this period of generalized hunger that the figurines of Venus emerged.
“During this time, humans had to deal with advancing glaciers and falling temperatures that led to nutritional stress, regional extinctions and a reduction in population,” the authors note in the study.
Johnson and colleagues suspected it was no coincidence. They measured the waist-to-hip ratios and waist-to-shoulder ratios of the figures and noted where the figures were found. They then compared this map of locations to the map of known glaciers, the spots where temperatures were lowest and food was probably the scarce.
They found an interesting trend: the closer the figurines were to glaciers, the more likely they were to have over-represented body relationships. In other words, the more hungry people were, the more they viewed obesity as a standard.
“We propose that they convey body ideals for young women, and especially those who lived near glaciers,” said Johnson, who has a degree in anthropology as well as a doctor. “We found that body size proportions were higher when glaciers were advancing, while obesity decreased when the climate warmed and glaciers retreated.”
While this is a bit speculative, it makes a lot of sense. It is not uncommon for scarcity of resources to define ideals. An obese woman would have been more likely to give birth, although too many women are unlikely to be overweight at the time. However, the figurines may have had a spiritual significance, a charm that would protect women during pregnancy and breastfeeding.
This idea is also supported by the fact that the figurines were worn out, suggesting that they have been stored for many years and possibly passed down from generation to generation.
“The figurines have emerged as an ideological tool to help improve the fertility and survival of mothers and babies,” Johnson said. “The aesthetics of art therefore had a significant function in emphasizing health and survival to adapt to increasingly austere climatic conditions”.
The study has some limitations. The number of figurines was small at first, and researchers didn’t have access to the actual sculptures – they had to rely on photographs for measurements (meaning they couldn’t use measurements like girth). The researchers also note that the move to slimmer figurines could also mark a stylistic change rather than one related to hunger.
There is always some uncertainty when dealing with this type of study, but interdisciplinary methods, such as those used here, can help us better understand these ancient populations. In many ways, modern archeology is not about finding new things, but about interpreting them and putting them into context.
The study was published in the journal Obesity.
Source link
