The prehistoric ‘Venus of Willendorf’ figurine pictured at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, … [+]
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The Venus of Willendorf, a figurine estimated to have been made around 25,000 to 30,000 years ago, is considered a masterpiece of the paleolithic era. Found in 1908 by a workman near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria, it is now hosted in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.
A research team led by the anthropologist Gerhard Weber from the University of Vienna and the two geologists Alexander Lukeneder and Mathias Harzhauser, as well as the prehistorian Walpurga Antl-Weiser from the Natural History Museum, have now found that the rock from which the Venus was carved likely comes from northern Italy. This sheds new light on the remarkable mobility of the first modern humans south and north of the Alps.
The Venus von Willendorf is not only special in terms of its design, but also in terms of its material. While other Venus figures are usually made of ivory or bone, sometimes also of different stones, limestone was used for the Lower Austrian Venus, which is unique for such cult objects.
The research team used a special technology to examine the figurine. Thanks to micro-computed tomography, based on electromagnetic waves able to traverse solid objects, the researchers obtained a high-resolution image of the inner structure of the rock, showing unique features like layers, mineral composition, and even fossils.
The tomographic images from the Venus show layers of sediments with different grain densities and sizes. Between the layers there were also small remnants of shells and mineral grains. The fossil bivalve shell dates the rock into the Jurassic period. This rules out that the rock used to carve the figurine comes from the nearby Vienna Basin, as rocks found there date into the much younger Miocene era.
To locate the likely source of the rock, the team compared the tomographic images with rock samples from Austria, but also from all over Europe.
Based on the size distribution of thousands of measured ooliths – rounded grains of limestone formed by movements of waves in a shallow sea – the material comes from the Jurassic limestone formations near Lake Garda in northern Italy.
Oolitic limestone from the Alps.
D.Bressan
This is remarkable because it means that the Venus (or at least its material) 25,000 years ago started a long journey from the south of the Alps to the Danube river north of the Alps.
“People in the Gravettian—the tool culture of the time—looked for and inhabited favorable locations. When the climate or the prey situation changed, they moved on, preferably along rivers,” explains Gerhard Weber. Such a journey could have taken generations.
The study is published as an open-access paper in the journal scientific reports.
