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An ancient carved statue of a very full - figured womanhood , known as the Venus of Willendorf , arise far from where it was found in the former 20th century , in Willendorf , Austria . scientist recently peered inside the voluptuousIce Agefigure for the first clock time since its find and find clue that helped them trace the source of the stone to a location hundreds of Swedish mile away , in northerly Italy .
The statue , which measures just 4.3 inches ( 11 centimeters ) marvellous , dates to about 30,000 old age ago during the Paleolithic period ( 2.6 million to 10,000 years ago ) . An Ice Age artisan would have chip at the figure with flint tools , and researchers with the Natural History Museum of Vienna ( NMW ) dig up the ocher - painted carving from a money box on the Danube River on Aug. 7 , 1908,according to the museum ’s website .
The original Venus from Willendorf. Left: lateral view. Right top: hemispherical cavities on the right haunch and leg. Right bottom: existing hole enlarged to form the navel.
Though little , the Venus statue is extremely detailed , represent " a symbolized grownup and faceless female person with overdone genitalia , pronounced haunch , a protruding belly , heavy breasts , and a advanced headgear or hairdo , " researchers write in a Modern study , publish Feb. 28 in the journalScientific Reports . In fact , archaeologists who discovered the statue named it after a deity of love , because at the time they presume that ancient female statues with prominent sexual feature were surely fertility rate goddess .
It was the statuette ’s raw material rather than its representational detail that intrigued the scientist . It was carve from oolitic limestone , a type of sedimentary rock made of spheric grain cement together , according to the Kansas Geological Survey . However , there are no oolitic limestone deposits for at least 124 nautical mile ( 200 km ) around Willendorf , allot to the work .
As one of the previous examples of figural carving , the Venus form is considered too rare and valuable to risk investigating it with encroaching method . But micro - computedX - raytomography ( CT ) scan offered scientist a fortune to noninvasively examine sediment and particles inside the statue . They look at the bunch of ooid spheres in the limestone , compare them with clump from like oolitic limestone deposits that were sampled from position across Europe : from France to theUkraineand Crimea in the east , and from Germany to as far south as Sicily . Limestone samples from Saga de Ala , a site in northerly Italy ’s Lake Garda valley , were " virtually indistinguishable " from the Venus limestone , suggesting " a very high probability for the cutting material to get from Dixie of the Alps , " the scientists wrote in the field of study .
Pictures derived from micro-computed tomography scans of the Venus figure show an embedded bivalve and limonite (iron ore) concretions.
Their scans also showed that Venus ' stony interior hold in fragments of diminutive lamellibranch fossils , which the scientist identified as belong to the genusOxytomidae . That placed the eld of the stone between 251 million and 66 million twelvemonth old , when that now - extinct genus was alive . Oolite limestone from northerly Italy likewise hold bivalve shard , the researchers report .
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How then did the carved image twine up hundreds of mi from northern Italy ? The Willendorf Venus is associated with people in the Gravettian refinement , which emerged about 30,000 years ago and was distributed across Europe . While it ’s impossible to tell when the limestone was collected and when the figure was carve and brought from the Alps to the Danube , the journey may have spanned generations and suggests that Gravettian huntsman - gatherers were extremely fluid , concord to the bailiwick .
Originally published on Live Science .
