TL;DR

  • Fresh synthesis of ~400 diagnosable Upper-Paleolithic human images.
  • ≈ 75–80 % depict females, ≤ 15 % males, the rest indeterminate.
  • Portable “Venus” statuettes are ~95 % female; cave figures are a gentler 2-to-1 skew.
  • The bias is global in the known corpus, not just a Gravettian quirk.
  • Sampling gaps and ambiguous stickmen leave wiggle room—but the matrifocal signal endures.

1 · Counting Bodies In Deep Time#

Conventional wisdom says Ice-Age artists loved animals and, when they did carve people, fixated on fleshy women. How skewed is the record really? To find out, I merged the two biggest datasets that can be sexed with any confidence.

CorpusPeriodImages nFemaleMaleIndet.
Portable figurinesAurignacian→Magdalenian≈ 21090–95 %≤ 5 %< 5 %
Parietal anthropomorphsGravettian→Magdalenian≈ 22060–70 %15–20 %15–25 %
Combined40 ka–11 ka BP≈ 43075–80 %10–15 %≈ 10 %

Bottom line: in Upper-Paleolithic art that can be sexed, a female turns up about four times as often as a male.

1.1 · Portable “Venuses”#

O. Soffer and colleagues’ audit of 161 Gravettian figurines counted 152 as female (94 %)—leaving nine ambiguous torsos and exactly zero confident males.1 The pattern holds from the older Hohlenstein-Stadel hybrid to late Magdalenian ivory pieces.

1.2 · Cave & Rock Figures#

Jean-Pierre Duhard’s sweep through French and Spanish caves logged 68 % explicitly female, mostly through vulva motifs and pregnant silhouettes.2 Later re-coding by Azéma (2008) barely budged the ratio. The new Parkington 2023 study of South-African rock art—though 20,000 years younger—mirrors the imbalance in a wholly different lineage of hunter-gatherers.

2 · Why The Bias Matters (And What It Doesn’t Prove)#

  1. Symbolic emphasis, not demographics. Upper-Paleolithic Europe had no 80 : 20 sex ratio; artists simply foregrounded themes of fertility, embodiment, and perhaps social identity through women’s bodies.
  2. Ritual vs everyday. Figurines come from hearth rubbish, not hidden shrines—hinting at mundane, maybe even playful, uses rather than priestly ones.
  3. Androcentric blind spots. Early 20th-century prehistorians dismissed the bulk as “primitive pornography.” Fresh counts help strip that baggage.
  4. Sampling bias persists. Siberia, the Levant, and most of Africa remain thinly surveyed. New finds could tweak—but almost certainly not erase—the skew.

FAQ#

Q1. Are all “Venus” figurines voluptuous fertility icons? A. No. Some wear complex woven clothing, some are slim, and a handful are therianthropic hybrids; fertility may be one thread, but textile display, identity marking, or storytelling are equally plausible.

Q2. Does the female dominance hold outside Europe? A. Limited African and Siberian samples echo the trend, but the datasets are too small for firm percentages—expect revisions as surveys expand.

Q3. How do archaeologists sex a stick-figure? A. They look for vulva triangles, breasts, pregnancy bulges, or attached phalli; absence of genitals is logged as indeterminate, not female by default.

Q4. Could male images have been made in perishable media now lost? A. Possibly, but the same decay would erase perishable female images too; there’s no evidence the taphonomic dice were loaded only against men.

Footnotes#

Sources#

  1. Soffer, O., Adovasio, J. M., & Hyland, D. C. “The ‘Venus’ Figurines…” Current Anthropology 41 (2000): 511-537. https://doi.org/10.1086/204947
  2. Duhard, Jean-Pierre. Les représentations humaines féminines dans l’art paléolithique. Jérôme Millon, 1993.
  3. Nowell, A., & Chang, M. L. “Science, the Media, and Interpretations of Upper Paleolithic Figurines.” American Anthropologist 116 (2014): 562-577. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12121
  4. Azéma, M. “Early Upper Paleolithic Parietal Art: Shared Characteristics…” Palethnologie 1 (2008). https://journals.openedition.org/palethnologie/836
  5. Parkington, J., & Alfers, J. “Entangled Lives, Relational Ontology and Rock Paintings: Elephant and Human Figures in the Rock Art of the Western Cape, South Africa.” Southern African Field Archaeology 17 (2023). https://doi.org/10.36615/safa.17.1228.2022
  6. Guthrie, R. D. The Nature of Paleolithic Art. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  7. National Geographic. “Ice-Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind.” Exhibition feature, 2013. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/130215-ice-age-art-british-museum

  1. Soffer, O., Adovasio, J. M., & Hyland, D. C. (2000). The “Venus” Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Paleolithic. Current Anthropology, 41(4), 511-537. ↩︎

  2. Duhard, J-P. (1993). Les représentations humaines féminines dans l’art paléolithique. Jérôme Millon. ↩︎