It traditionally has been assumed that the Venus figurines were created by men to serve male agendas as erotic representations of sexuality, beauty and fertility. This androcentric view of the Venuses has been espoused both in archaeological and art history scholarship.

The Venus figurines of Mal’ta (also: Malta) are several palaeolithic figurines of women found in Siberia, Russia. They consist most often of ivory. Delporte writes of 29 figurines altogether. They are about 20,000 years old and stem from the Gravettian.

Like many prehistoric artefacts, the exact cultural meaning of these figures may never be known. Archaeologists speculate, however, that they may be symbolic of security and success, fertility, or a mother goddess.

Many such figurines have been found across the globe, generally interpreted as being mother goddesses — considered magical because of their ability to create life. The mythology of the mother goddess places them as part of a divine pair with a male consort — who could sometimes also be human.

That being said, the oldest known work of art showing pregnancy is the Venus of Willendorf, dated between 28,000 and 25,000 BC. The oolitic limestone figurine was discovered in 1908 by the archaeologist Josef Szombathy in southern Austria. In Greek mythology, pregnancy was depicted through the story of Callisto.

Obesity in Female Figurines Correlates with Climate Change. We hypothesized that the degree of obesity of the female figurines related to changes in climate and proximity to the glaciers by measuring the waist-hip and waist-shoulder ratios of all known female Venus figurines (https://www.donsmaps.com/venus.html).

farmer Štefan Hulman-Petrech
It was ploughed up sometime before 1930 by the farmer Štefan Hulman-Petrech in Podkovica near the village of Moravany nad Váhom in Slovakia. It is made of mammoth tusk ivory and is dated to 22,800 BCE, (the Gravettian).

ivory
The Venus of Brassempouy (French: la Dame de Brassempouy, meaning “Lady of Brassempouy”, or Dame à la Capuche, “Lady with the Hood”) is a fragmentary ivory figurine from the Upper Palaeolithic, apparently broken from a larger figure at some time unknown.

A new theory about the iconic Venus figurines has suggested that the sculptures represent how climate change affected humans over 30,000 years ago. The Venus figurines are statuettes depicting obese women that, up until now, were thought to have been associated with fertility and beauty.

The people who forged them led a nomadic life and some scholars conjecture that they intentionally made the figures small and light for easy transport. This hypothesis points to the personal value of the figurines and their possible devotional use.

For this reason, many researchers theorize that these figures were not portraits of real women, but religious icons. Their small size, which suggests that the figures may have been held in the hands during rituals, further supports this theory.

Discovered in 1892 in a cave at Brassempouy, in the Landes department of southwestern France, this figurine is possibly the earliest prehistoric carving of a human face.