From a cave in southwestern Germany, archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known piece of figurative art. More than an ancient artistic impulse, it may signify a profound change in modern human brains.

Carved from ivory and depicting a woman with exaggerated sexual features, the pinkie-sized sculpture is 36,000 years old, or about 5,000 years older than the next-earliest piece of figurative art.

Though 77,000-year-old carvings have been found in South Africa, they consist of cross-hatched lines. Such abstractions are relatively simple compared to representational art, which requires high levels of cognition to both conceive and make.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the rise of figurine-carving modern human cultures in Europe coincided with the decline of Neanderthals. Some anthropologists suspect that humans of the era experienced a leap in mental abilities, fueled by random genetic mutation or the neurological nourishment of language and culture.

"The advent of fully representational, ‘figurative’ art seems at present to be a European phenomenon, without any documented parallels in Africa or elsewhere earlier than about 30,000 years ago," writes University of Cambridge archaeologist Paul Mellars in a commentary accompanying the discovery, published Wednesday in Nature.

"How far this ‘symbolic explosion’ associated with the origins and dispersal of our species reflects a major, mutation-driven reorganization in the cognitive capacities of the human brain — perhaps associated with a similar leap forward in the complexity of language — remains a fascinating and contentious issue," he wrote.

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Citations: "A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany." By Nicholas J. Conard. Nature, Vol. 459 No. 7244, May 14, 2009.

"Origins of the female image." By Paul Mellars. Nature, Vol. 459 No. 7244, May 14, 2009.