GLACIAL CULTURE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 29 January 1927, Page 11

GLACIAL CULTURE.

A N interesting little statue was re-

cently dug out at, Willendorf, in the Wachau (Austria). It is a slender female figure of mammoth bone, and Professor H. Bayer, director of the National History Museum in Vienna, says that it is at. least 20,000 -or 25,000 years old, and the work of an artist of the Glacial period (says,, the. San Francisco Chronicle). The statuette was found at the side of a huge lower jaw of a mammoth, which had probably given material for this prehistoric art work. Not far from the statuette lay a carving instrument of yellow jasper. Many years ago excavators found at the same place a female figure of flint stone, also dating back into the Glacial period, which was later given the name of “Venus of Willendorf." The difference between the two statues, which may Originate from the same artist, is striking. The first was rather stout and clumsy, with an accentuated stressing of. female, forms, while the. second is very long and almost mannish. The head has the shape of a pear, and the face is without any expression. It is believed that the second statue -is a symbol of the goddess of fertility.

Since the mammoth bone and the carving" instrument were found together with the statue, it is obvious that the little sculpture must have been, made on the spot where it was found. 1

Probably Glacial men had killed a mammoth and eaten its meat, and afterwards a skilled man among them commenced to carve the figure.

This is taken as final proof that Spain and France were not the only classic countries 'of- the Glacial period., as many scientists hitherto asserted., but that the territory of present Austria also was inhabited and showed the typical characteristics of Glacial culture. It is thought that this colonisation of Austria in the Glacial period set in later than Spain and France, and! that the herds of mammoths in this part of the globe attracted the: first settlers.