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'Oldest Porn Statue' (Adonis von Zschernitz; Germany)

Mal_Adjusted

Justified & Ancient
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Archaeologist finds 'oldest porn statue'

Krysia Diver in Stuttgart
Monday April 4, 2005
The Guardian

Stone-age figurines depicting what could be the oldest pornographic scene in the world have been unearthed in Germany.

Archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the 7,200-year-old remnants of a man having intercourse with a woman.

The extraordinary find, at an archaeological dig in Saxony, shatters the belief that sex was a taboo subject in that era.

Until now, the oldest representations of sexual scenes were frescos from about 2,000 years ago.

Harald Stäuble of the Archaeological Institute of Saxony, based in Dresden, discovered the 8cm lower half of a man, which has been named Adonis von Zschernitz.

"A unique find," reported Spiegel magazine. "This is the oldest male clay figurine ever discovered in the world."

But the most amazing find came at the dig in Leipzig one month later, when Dr Stäuble found what could be the matching female figurine.

Dr Stäuble, who is due to publish a paper on his findings this year, said: "After finding Adonis, we got the team to sieve every speck of soil for a whole month. We were well rewarded because we then found fragments of a female figurine of the same size."

He added: "Adonis is bent forward and the female figure is bent forward even more.

"There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that they were doing a ritual dance, but the other possibility is that the man and woman were copulating and that he was standing behind her. The copulation option is far more likely, and would make this the oldest representation ever of a pornographic scene."

Until now, there have been discoveries of clay models of women with large breasts and bottoms, which have always been interpreted as connected with fertility. But Adonis was the first figurine that clearly depicted male sexual organs.

"This is such an interesting discovery," said Dr Sträuble, "as these figurines are not stylistic, but realistic. They open up a gateway for historians and anthropologists to discuss whether sex really was a taboo subject in the stone age."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1451478,00.html

mal
 
I thought that sex being taboo was a much more recent development. After all, in a hunter-gatherer society, or an early agrarian one, sex and death are everyday occurrences.
 
One wonders how the theory arose that sex was taboo back then anyway...? Seems to be a bit of a leap of the imagination to me.
 
Archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the 7,200-year-old remnants of a man having intercourse with a woman.

If you read this sentence in isolation, it sounds like a bonking couple got buried alive. :lol:
 
anome said:
I thought that sex being taboo was a much more recent development. After all, in a hunter-gatherer society, or an early agrarian one, sex and death are everyday occurrences.

Agree totally. Anyway, why artefacts and images could not have had both a 'pornographic' and a ceremonial/ritual component is beyond me...what we regard as porn these days in our largely secular society may well have been seen as sacred in those days...

cf. Indian temples' tantrik carvings
 
besides one isolated find doesn't prove anything, the maker of the artefact could have been the town pervert.
 
Yes, everything usually has to have some 'ritual' significance. It may have been done for a variety of more mundane reasons - perhaps even because the maker of such an artefact found it amusing.
 
When archaeologists interpret things as being of a "ritual" nature, how exactly do they arive at that conclusion?

I often see experts on tv programmes ascribing ritual significance to all sorts of artefacts and customs, simply because they can't think of any other reason why people might use or make something.

A case in point was on a recent episode of Time Team when they desribed a pit of bones and such as a ritual site, when it could just as easily have been the village midden. Does the act of repeatedly walking across a field to dispose of garbage in a specific place eventually take on the staus of a ritual?

I agree with JerryB's comment that it could have been someone's idea of a dirty laugh. I think the "Poo" threads on this MB show that our idea of humour hasn't really progressed much in the last 7,200 years.

And if the figure of "Adonis" had grossly out of proportion parts, well, that would just about prove it in my opinion. :roll:
 
As JerryB and Jolly Jack point out, I think a lot of people (not just scientists, but people who believe in a utopian past, etc.) hold the opinion that because the world we live in is so vastly different from the one of 7,000 years that people were basically different. It seems far more likely that shortly after we figured out how to represent things and even ideas as images most of the subject matter was covered in pretty short order. :D
 
That's true - if we look at various ways humans have used media (i.e. paint, photography, etc.) we see that it's not long before someone decides to use it for either their own particular 'entertainment' or to provide such for others. (WRT pornography - a good example is the way that photography was used to create porn very early in the medium's development). To me it seems less of a leap of the imagination to think that such figures, despite their age, may have had no religious or 'ritual' significance at all. The problem with the whole 'ritual' thing is that it paints the people of the past in such a dour way ;) They're all so bloody serious :D One somtimes wonders if the 'ritual' label is slapped on to give any find more import - which probably says more about the archaeologist than the find itself...
 
Everytime archeologists finds an item which could be controversial and disturb the status quo in the business, they label it an ritual item and dismiss all other theories.
 
I'm afraid the mental image I have of some ancient cave-dweller carving a statue of a couple having sex, chuckling with delight at what the neighbours are going to say, is much more convincing than "ritualistic purposes". It'd be entirely feasible if the creator was an acne-ridden teenager who wanted to shock his folks.
 
Well, I dunno about that, Vardoger. It seems to me that some aspects of the discipline are still stuck in the anthropological side of things - that is, they tend to root some things in how they see things in modern 'primitive' cultures, in a comparitive way. But to me that seems to assume that those cultures are somewhat more static, that perhaps they haven't really changed in essence for such a long time that they're more like societal systems from the more ancient past.
 
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