Prehistoric figurines like that I’m counting as inadmissible because we don’t know what they were for. It’s common to call them “Venuses” and something something fertility totems but nobody knows for sure what they’re for or why they were made. They could have been anything from goddess totems to self-portraits to wank dolls.
Contrast that to portraits of Min on Egyptian temple walls where we have a pretty thorough understanding of their purpose.
I saw a video by Joe Scott in which he asked the question, what was the earliest depiction of a human face? Because it’s a weirdly recent phenomenon; prehistoric cave paintings are full of animals and silhouettes of human hands, but rarely any humans at all and if so only as rudimentary stick figures, nowhere near as well drawn as the animals. There are extremely few depictions of human faces that predate the invention of writing. Those “Venus” statues are practically always headless or, like the one shown above, has an abstract nub where the head should be.
Prehistoric figurines like that I’m counting as inadmissible because we don’t know what they were for. It’s common to call them “Venuses” and something something fertility totems but nobody knows for sure what they’re for or why they were made. They could have been anything from goddess totems to self-portraits to wank dolls.
Contrast that to portraits of Min on Egyptian temple walls where we have a pretty thorough understanding of their purpose.
Let’s face it. They were wank dolls. Prehistoric hustler.
I saw a video by Joe Scott in which he asked the question, what was the earliest depiction of a human face? Because it’s a weirdly recent phenomenon; prehistoric cave paintings are full of animals and silhouettes of human hands, but rarely any humans at all and if so only as rudimentary stick figures, nowhere near as well drawn as the animals. There are extremely few depictions of human faces that predate the invention of writing. Those “Venus” statues are practically always headless or, like the one shown above, has an abstract nub where the head should be.
Have you a link to the video?
https://youtu.be/9LCBqaVzvuY