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The earliest examples of the artistic activities of the people of the Ice Age are derived from the middle Aurignacian epoch, i.e. from about the middle of the later palæolithic period. It is a remarkable feature of this art that side by side with quite primitive attempts at painting and engraving we find a sculpture that has reached full artistic fruition and which is preoccupied almost exclusively with rendering the female form.
Up till the present time approximately seventy female figures from the Aurignacian culture have been discovered.1 The majority of these works are sculpture, but little more than a half of them belong to the more realistic type; the others are heavily stylised, indeed for the most part are purely schematic representations. As against this substantial number of female figures there are only five representing males. Besides these works representing human beings whose sex is clearly defined, there are some thirteen figures which cannot be identified as belonging to either sex.
We perceive then that the proportion of female figures is unusually high. But the significance of this fact is further enhanced by the remarkable circumstance that we also find in the Aurignacian a considerable number of isolated representations of the vulva; whereas in the Magdalenian, i.e. the latest palæolithic epoch, such representations are comparatively rare. The paucity of male figures (in those that exist the sexual organ is quite inconspicuous) is in harmony with the fact that the Aurignacian has not produced one single isolated representation of the phallus. In the Magdalenian, on the other hand, it is precisely the phallus which is so frequently reproduced—the number of representations actually exceeding those of the vulva in the Aurignacian.