A delicate Palaeolithic Venus has just been discovered in the Bryansk region of Russia.
The statue is Barely 5 cm high and is carved from the ivory of a woolly mammoth. The new „Palaeolithic Venus“ is dated 23,000 years ago. It was recently discovered in Siberia.
With its voluminous buttocks and generous breasts, the exquisite round work is, despite its small size, in line with the „classical“ criteria of these female statuettes.
It was in the Bryansk region of western Russia that experts from the Palaeolithic Archeology Department of the Moscow Institute of Archeology and Ethnography exhumed this moving remnant at a site called Khotylyovo -2 which they have studied since 1993.
According to Konstantin Gavrilov, Author of the find, (Siberian Times of April 17, 2017), the figurine with the bent legs was placed on the ground, close to bones of mammoths on which traces of mineral pigments were still visible. Recently, a similar example was found near the Angara River, near Lake Baikal.
With their voluminous shapes and their absent face, these sculptures of human form, of which there are now about 250 copies, have been discovered since the end of the 19th century from the Atlantic to the confines of the Russian steppes.
The first of them was discovered in France, in Laugerie-Basse, in the Dordogne, in 1864. Curiously, none of these statuettes has yet been encountered in the Iberian Peninsula.
Their size varies from 4 cm to 25 cm high and they date back more than 35 000 years for the oldest, as was the case in 2008 on the Hohle Felsdeposit in Germany.
For the majority of them, they have experienced an extraordinary consistency in their appearance for millennia, whatever the time or place.
The role and function of these silhouettes shaped in ivories, soft rocks or terra cotta patterns are always discussed. In France, the last Venus, known as Renancourt, 15 cm high and cut into limestone, was found in 2014 in the region of Amiens .
