What this says

Venus figure created about 25,000 years ago from the Kostenki-Borshevo region on the Don River, north of the Black Sea.

Kostenki / Kostienki is a very important Paleolithic site on the Don River in Russia. It was a settlement which contained goddess figures, dwellings made of mammoth bones, and many flint tools and bone implements. Actually it is not a single site but really an area on the right bank of the Don River in the region of the villages of Kostenki and Borshevo, consisting of more than twenty site locations, all dating to the Paleolithic.

Just think how someone spent hours creating this lovely figure.

And I look at the features of her body, and am aware that the artist was celebrating the woman/goddess who gave life and nurtured it. The model for the figure was well fed, quite capable, and yet her own facial features weren't considered important. 

Would a person of that era find this a turn-on sexually? Or would the figure represent the highest respect for women and perhaps even goddesses! At least this type of body was considered beautiful. Since there are so many similar small figures found in the same area, it's likely that many people made these for an unknown reason...maybe by women as well as men who crafted them. That they were numerous suggests that they had importance in that culture. Early archaeologists thought they were fertility icons. Now they are open to interpreting them as goddesses in a matriarchal society.

The pyramid of patriarchy had not yet taken over society. 

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Matriarchy isn’t women on top, it’s a circle with children and the vulnerable at the center.

It is not a mirror image of patriarchy, nor a reversal of domination. Matriarchy is rooted in care, responsibility, and collective survival. Power is not hoarded at the top—it flows outward, guided by the needs of those who require protection the most. Leadership is measured by nourishment, not control. Strength is shown through safeguarding life, honoring interdependence, and valuing empathy as intelligence. In this structure, women do not rule over others; they steward communities. It is not about supremacy, but balance—where dignity is preserved, harm is minimized, and humanity is sustained.

as posted by Claudia Frasca-Jones on Facebook in "She's of Love"

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And somehow our civilization discovered mechanical tool making, so craftsmanship moved more rapidly, and many people became specialized in their creativity. I'd guess that of all these men in the photo below, a few of them would be able to carve a venus to exemplify their own paragon of virtue and beauty.

I don't know at this point what the 25,000 year old figure was made of, and am assuming a carved bone of some kind. 

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At the grand opening of the new Town Hardware last weekend, I saw a wood carver who used a completely industrial age tool. The chain-saw.

Though I totally support crafts...these aren't things that speak to me.

“The greatest revolution of our time is in the way we see the world. The mechanistic paradigm underlying the Industrial Growth Society gives way to the realization that we belong to a living, self-organizing cosmos.” ~Joanna Macy