25,000-year-old Venus has Viennese in thrall
By VERONIKA OLEKSYN
Vienna
Aug. 7: It’s Venusmania in Vienna, where Austrians are celebrating the discovery 100 years ago on Thursday of a tiny but voluptuous figurine that dates back 25,000 years to a time when mammoths roamed the region.
Venus wine, Venus chocolates, and pancakes with Venus jam — Austria is going all out on Friday to fete the limestone beauty known as the Venus of Willendorf for the hamlet along the Danube where archaeologists stumbled upon her a century ago.
The Venus of Willendorf is just 11 cm tall but is celebrated for her undeniably curvy, feminine figure.
Experts say the statuette dating back to the Paleolithic era is among the world’s oldest depictions of a woman.
But exactly what she represents — or who carved her all those thousands of years ago — remains a mystery.
Was she a fertility symbol, a lucky charm, a goddess — maybe even a prehistoric piece of pornography?
"That’s of course an interpretation question," said Walpurga Antl-Weiser, an expert at Vienna’s Natural History Museum who has written a book on the topic and is one of the few to have personally handled the Venus.
She wasn’t made from local materials, and over the years, similar statuettes have been found elsewhere, including France and Russia, Ms Antl-Weiser said. And, she noted, it’s tough to know the exact motives of humans who lived so many centuries ago.
— AP