LONDON – A venus figurine discovered last year in an archeological dig in southwest Germany is the oldest such carving ever discovered. The sexually-explicit figurine is 60-millimetre-long and dates from the earliest Aurignacian period of about 35,000-40,000 years ago.

“The feature of the newly discovered figure that will undoubtedly command most attention is its explicitly, almost aggressively, sexual nature, focused on the sexual characteristics of the female form,” Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge, wrote in a commentary.

“Whichever way one views these representations, it is clear that the sexually symbolic dimension in European (and indeed worldwide) art has a long ancestry in the evolution of our species.”

The figurine was discovered by Nicholas Conard of the University of Tubingen, who has been working the excavation site, an Upper Paleolithic cave in Hohle Fels, Germany, since the 1990s. According to an archeology blog on About.com, the next oldest venus figurine is from Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic, between about 28,000 and 31,000 years ago.

Venus figurines are small carvings of women with exaggerated features, found in Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe that date back to between 31,000 and 9,000 years ago.