Let's not forget the golden food: honey.

In all seriousness, those figurines probably represent well-fed, healthy pregnancies rather than obesity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf

Kallyn, have you seen the Guns Germs & Steel DVD yet? It shows the same New Guineanas and talks about how different their environment was. Very low protein there, so low they have to supplement with giant spiders. They could have Kwashiorkor which I think causes the sticking out belly but they're otherwise very thin.

My other thought is that they're even more poorly adapted to wheat than we are and they're eating more wheat nowadays, and that could account for the swollen belly.

Plus some of those starches eaten on tropical islands have some toxic properties and if they're not cooked exactly right you can have some interesting responses. It was Sago palm starch they eat in New Guinea. There's a lot about them in the GG&S video.

But those stone age fertility symbols are more like modern obesity, with fat everywhere and the belly/apron, fat thighs etc.

Sorry. They don't look well-fed and healthy to me! They look like the contestants in "The Biggest Loser" constests at their first weigh ins. There is way too much fat rolling around the back of the torso to be healthy. Certainly not toned and muscular women even at near term.

On the other hand, perhaps grandmothers who had successfully survived several pregancies, and lived to see those children produce grandchildren, achieved an honored place in society that allowed them to eat first and liberally without the obligation of much physical labor. A relatively sedentary lifestyle accompanied by ample food certainly DOES create such a body. Perhaps we're expecting fertility goddesses to look like women of child-bearing years, when they actually were embodied by the older, menopausal matriarchs of the tribe.

I agree that's a possibility. They obviously wouldn't have the same standards as us about what defines "preferred" body type. Obesity was probably interpreted very differently. Anyone see Quest for Fire (the movie) recently? It's an old movie, and dubiously accurate, but there was a scene in the movie of a very large woman being given her sexual preference of males. It's worth a rewatch if you haven't seen it in a while.

I'd not get too caught up in the idea of these as representational art. They are likely to be an exaggeration of a number of feminine features and archetypes: well fed women, pregnancy, buttocks, breasts and thighs. In that sense they are a complete picture of the unique physical aspects of womanhood through the eyes of a society where pregnancy was dangerous, fatness was rare and desirable and the uniqueness of the sexes a kind of miracle.

The women who are "fattened" to be wives in Mauritania were force fed oodles of milk.

Except that they're incredibly accurate. That is what extremely obese women look like.

Huh? What's easy for you to say becomes difficult for my cave man brain.

I concur. It's hyperbole. All good art is hyperbole. ...Oops, I'm not trying to open a can of worms here. It's just my opinion.

Also, I think many of the distented tummies you see in the third world are caused by parasites and infection. I've traveled the Philipinnes with a Peace Corps volunteer who was warned not to drink the water because of this.

I agree with Nancy that there had to be at least some obese women around for them to make these statues.

I was just at the NJ shore last weekend and in one of the little shore museums they had a mask made by the natives who used to inhabit the coastline. According to the information plate on the mask, the mask was made after the natives came into contact with white men and here's how they know: the shape of the nose. Before white men came to America, they had only ever seen people that looked like themselves and had never seen the kind of narrow pointed white-man nose that the Europeans had. It had never occured to them that noses could look like that. So once the white men came, they started to distinguish their masks by the nasal features to highlight the differences between themselves and the white Europeans. Anyway, my point in all of this is that if a whole group of relatively advanced people couldn't even imagine that people's noses could look different, how could they ever imagine an obese woman if they had never seen one?

I don't believe that for a minute. There's a huge amount of dispute (understatement!) about the prehistoric Caucasian elements in the native american gene pool. Early European art in America seems to show a huge variation in appearance.

I'm just saying what the museum told me, so I don't have too much invested in this hypothesis. It was also only about the one tribe who lived close to the southern NJ coastline.

Still, I keep thinking this statuette is just a mere childbirth symbol exalted though high up to exaggeration. A sort of protruding femininity . And in case you didn’t know, females do become plumpy, veeery well-rounded during pregnancy. All this could have been augmented by several child-bearing experiences, which weren’t rare at that time. As to probability of the fattening diet itself, I highly doubt that as, in the first place, the artifact dates back to around 25000 BC, the period standing far away from stuffing ourselves up with grains and starches. Second, Donau basin area isn’t a tropical area either, so fruits and berries are very seasonal and rare guests there, strictly linked to late summer, early autumn days. And if you think you could eat handfuls of those forefruits with a whisk, first make an outing to autumn Sakhalin and try wild apples there; just a bite at least, unless your jaw contracts out of extreme sour taste. The same is true about wild strawberries; the Sakhalin inhabitants usually load them with sugar to make it edible. So it seems, this paleo goddess would sooner kill a fox or a rabbit hiding in those berry bushes rather than experiment with her taste buds tolerance level. Besides, I have never seen any Ainu female obese, however picky I had been.
Not that I negate few anecdotal cases of obesity due to metabolic, hormonal dysfunctions, I just wouldn’t like to extrapolate this funny example to all of the guiltless upper paleo tribes.

To tell the truth, when opening the thread I hadn’t expected it to turn into discussion of the single case of well-fed statuette or even worse, into debates over males and females privilege, which is like arguing over whether left or right side is superior.
Why don’t we make this talk constructive and sculpt our own evolution line of average females?

I thought many primative cultures admired a heavier woman, for they were thought of as being truly healthy. So one might be lead to believe that thin was more the norm then. We tend to admire what we don't have more than what we have. So in a society where a large percentage of people are heavy, it stands to reason that we admire the thin ones.






Both very funny.

Ironically Nelson, your response was the old Pot calling the Kettle black.

Of course, if someone said to you, “don’t touch that stove it is hot”, would you think that person is being sanctimonious, patronizing and lecturing you? Because that is all I am doing here, saying hey, don’t base your self-esteem on what gender you are, base it on something that you actually have control of, something you actually have done or accomplished.

(Insults are easy, Wisdom takes time)

That’s true. While even up to present days and in nearly all the cultures we still admire fat babies, with “plump” being the synonym for “healthy”, at the same time expressing great concern over skinny ones and classifying them as sick or ill-nourished. This is all very deeply rooted...

Poor dear. Maybe if you stand up next time it won't whiz by quite so fast.