Looks more like a big bloke with a tiny head carrying a giant parsnip to me.

dose it look a bit like chicken?

Now watch some archaeologist claim it had "religious significance".

A carving of a human figure = porn?

All the sexy bits and no head. Somethings never change.

i thought you must be working in america to find that amorphous lump of something to be nsfw, but i can't work out the time difference after a nice friday liquid lunch..

Are you friggin kidding? It has the word 'pornography' in the link to the article!

Or are you the sort or person who needs a label on their peanut bag warning them that said bag contains peanuts?

Heh, unlikely ;o)

The comment about neocons made me think... I've heard fundamentalists explain away pesky things like fossil evidence as 'god did it' - i.e., it was all just planted to f*ck with us. But surely a fundamentalist god isn't going to go around planting jubtastic idols like this?

@nsfw ac: dude, it might have been pornographic 40,000 years ago... today's standards are a bit different...

The worlds oldest profession (obsession) is SEX!

"The prehistoric "tool" was reassembled from 14 fragments of siltstone"

I bet it was a hand-held sharpening stone used to put a point back on a deer antler plough or something useful like that, you know, those essential to daily life things that were oh so common and vital in those days.

A soon as a modern, beardy, sex-starved archaeologist sees the thing, it get's incorporated into his fantasies and becomes a broken dildo, sheesh. Note the additional information in the article..."it was also at times used for knapping flints"....I rest my case.

Um.. Im going to go and clean up now...

PS, just me or does it look like ms Hilton?

Those 'jubs' seem to have markings on the front about where facial features would be and on top they seem to have lines going backward like hair. Someone carrying two children in some kind of sling?

Not that I claim to be a an expert on caveman fetishes, but it strikes me as very odd that it would be headless. I wonder if it could have had a head made from a different material originally.

"Anyhow, is there any evidence that this find is pornographic (designed purely to enflame sexual desire) as opposed to being an object of worship, fertility symbol etc etc or is it just Friday when a journo's mind turns to the finer things in life?"

The later. The concept of nudity==porn is fairly modern. It's a fertility symbol. But if all the rest of y'all really enjoy the 14yo boy locker room humor, don't let me get in your way.

Big hipped, big breasted, rotund women were and are still preferred where long cold winters prevail. I would guess a fat, possibly pregnant woman would have been prized as a symbol of a good hunting/gathering season and the promise of being able to last out the winter. Hypotrophic, androgonous boy/girls with recessed testicles where their ovaries should be are the product of urban culture.

I'm glad I live in this age.

Porn has improved in 35K years.

We can download it faster.

You wrote: "These idols were pretty common back then"

Uh ... Actually, the point of the article is that this one is the first that has been found from the particular "back then" in question, and pushes the advent of human art back by several millennia.

It's not surprising that it's headless. Plenty of ancient European myths state that to look on the face of a god or goddess was a quick way to die. Robert Graves discusses this facet of mythology in his book, _The White Goddess._

The more I look at it, the more it doesn't look like anything except a guy carrying a huge turnip or parsnip. It's obviously an agricultural magazine report on someone's prize tuber. Pornography? Bullshit!

If you have seen the front of the little thing ... detailed clitoris, wide open vagina, swollen labia ... if this is religious, its the religion of anatomists of the arousal.