I was trying to talk about the game PlateUp! and why I don't like baked beans when I checked a number on Wikipedia and found this lovely lady.
This is the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, and it's 27,000-31,000 years old. It was found in Czechia.
And that age is breaking my brain. It was twenty millenia before we domesticated cats. We wouldn't be able to write about this figure for 24,000 years, since writing didn't exist.
Stonehenge and the Pyramids were built closer to today than they were to this figure, and it's not even close. It's closer to now by a LOT.
It's called a "Venus" because of the trend of Paleolithic art showing women with exaggerated features, named after a Roman God from, you know, 26 thousand years later.
BTW one theory for why these figure look like this is that they are self-portraits by women who were looking down at their own bodies. This makes sense because mirrors are only 8000 years old and this figure predates them by a couple decade-milleniums.
This figure is so old that if we're currently on the night of December 31st and it was made on January 1st, Jesus was born on December 7th. The moon landing was earlier today. We didn't invent writing until late October.
Humans have been humans, just humaning along, for so fucking long.
I like the self-portrait theory, but like... I work at a pool and I've seen people who look like that, or almost like that. So it could also well be a pretty accurate, if stylized portrait.
Also, I remember when I was little and made figurines, I sometimes used my nails to make the eyes, and they looked just like that. People really were always people...