Throughout the Upper Paleolithic era, between about ten thousand and fifty thousand years ago, hunter-gatherers across a broad swath of Eurasia—from the Pyrenees to Siberia—carved small objects out of stone, mammoth ivory, clay, and bone that represented human figures, nearly all of them female. These carvings are the oldest figurative works of art made by Homo sapiens, and they are known collectively as Venus figurines. The term was coined, in 1864, by a French nobleman, the Marquis de Vibraye. Digging on his property in the Dordogne, he had unearthed a slim ivory girl, headless and armless, with coltish legs and a prominent vulva. He christened her the Immodest Venus, an ironic reference to the Venus pudica, a type of classical sculpture. He knew that she was of ancient provenance only because, earlier that year, two archeologists working in the Périgord had presented the first conclusive evidence that the remains and artifacts that their sites had recently yielded were prehistoric, rather than Celtic—the common assumption. Thus a discipline was born.

In the past century and a half, about two hundred Venus figurines have been discovered, individually and in clusters. Nearly all of them are Thumbelinas, a few inches tall, although the majority share the body type of a Lucian Freud model. They are luxuriously obese, with folds of flesh at the belly, hefty thighs, steatopygic buttocks, and pendulous breasts. Their pudenda are marvelously realistic. Pinheads, however, with undefined features, are the norm. In some cases, their tapered legs are suggestive of a phallus, or of the merging, in one figure, of male and female attributes. A number of the Venuses sport finely wrought garments—what appear to be a woven snood, a conical hat, a plaited grass girdle or halter, a sort of hula skirt. A scholarly article on the subject was subtitled “Women’s Wear, c. 27,000 B.P.” (before the present). Fashion predates the wheel.

Despite a family resemblance, there is considerable stylistic variation across the vast spans of time and space that produced the figurines. Artists in Western Europe emphasized thighs and hips, while those in Eastern and Central Europe were breast and belly aficionados. The diversity of shapes, like that in a Russian bath, is eloquent about the stresses of life and gravity on the female body in a way that contemporary images of desirable women rarely dare to be. We don’t know whether the sculptors had models, or, if so, whether they were chosen for their beauty. But the corpulent ideal that the sculptures embody (not to say their nudity) would have been rare during the Ice Age. Perhaps it was an emblem of prestige—or of wishful thinking.

However many Thanksgiving weekends are left to humankind, our ancient past is a jumbo jigsaw that we won’t complete. Most of its pieces are lost, and there is no illustration to guide the placement of those we possess, so we fill the void with our own projections. But, occasionally, a new find fills out the picture. In 2008, archeologists in Germany, at the cave of Hohe Fels, in the Swabian Jura, found a female carving that they dated to 40,000 B.P., making her a contemporary of the last Neanderthals and the oldest exemplar of her species. The team has been working at the same site for nearly twenty years, and last month they unearthed two fragments of a second figure—part of the breast and belly. According to the project leader, Nicholas Conrad, “The new discovery indicates that the female depictions are not as rare in the Aurignacian”—a designation for the earliest Paleolithic culture—“as previously thought, and that concerns about human sexuality, reproduction, and fertility in general have a very long and rich history.”

Here one should note that Conrad deftly avoided the epithet “Venus.” However sexy it may sound in a press release, it is the misnomer for an unsupported presumption that the figurines, like their namesake divinity, are fertility goddesses. They may have been objects of worship, but they may also have been likenesses of actual women—revered mothers, perhaps. They may have served a ritual function in burials, childbirth, or initiations. A few seem to have been worn, and were, perhaps, cherished possessions. The woman of Hohle Fels was once coated with ochre pigment, and a loop, suitable for threading, sits on her shoulders in place of a head. Two figurines from the Grimaldi caves of Liguria (c. 25,000 B.P.) are perforated at the sternum, and one is described in the literature as a “pendant.” Not all the carvings celebrate fecundity—a number depict old ladies. We do not know, and probably never will, what these carvings signified to the people who created them. But the emotion that they convey is beyond dispute. It is awe and gratitude for life’s renewal, and that is the gift they passed down to us.