Flora Unveiled

22 i Flora Unveiled

survival of Paleolithic societies.^28 Since it is likely that small game hunting and fishing in the
Paleolithic were carried out by women, children, and the elderly, the evidence further sup-
ports the view that the roles of women in Paleolithic societies were important and diverse.
Prior to Soffer’s discovery, the high quality of the textiles produced during the Upper
Paleolithic was not appreciated. Given the apparent division of labor between men and
women in the Upper Paleolithic, with women taking primary responsibility for the gather-
ing and processing of plants for food and fiber, women were most likely the inventors of the
new technology. Consistent with this idea, the textile revolution coincides with the sudden
appearance of the Venus figurines all over Europe.

Sexual Symbolism in Parietal Art

In the absence of written records, Upper Paleolithic wall art has the greatest potential to
tell us what Ice Age people knew, or did not know, about the role of the male in procre-
ation.^29 A hypothetical triptych that would unequivocally demonstrate that people under-
stood the causal relationship between copulation and pregnancy would be a sequence of
illustrations depicting copulation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Unfortunately, no such set
of images has ever been found in all the Paleolithic caves of Europe. Indeed, humans were
rarely depicted in parietal art. Most of the painted images are of large animals, such as bison,
aurochs, horses, and deer. When humans are represented, they are usually female. Images
of women can be naturalistic, as in the “Lady of Laussel” (see Figure 2.1) or symbolic, such
as the schematic vulvas inscribed or painted on walls or stone blocks at many European
Upper Paleolithic sites, examples of which are shown in Figure 2.5. Consistent with the

Figure 2.5 Upper Paleolithic images of vulvas.
(Top) From Angulo Cuesta, J., and M. Garcia Diez (2005), Sexo en Piedra. Sexualidad, Reproducción y
Erotismo en Época Paleolítica; (bottom) from Marshack, A. (1991), The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive
Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation. McGraw- Hill.