With its outsize bulbous breasts and hugely exaggerated genitalia, a statuette of a woman has pushed back the history of female figurative art by 5000 years, to at least 35,000 years ago.

Anthropologists are staggered by the find, which also shows that even this long ago, our brains and their ability to think in abstract ways were probably as sophisticated as they are now.

Discovered in the Hohle Fels Caves of south-western Germany, the "Venus" figurine carved from mammoth ivory is remarkably well-preserved, with only the left arm and shoulder missing. "It's perhaps the earliest example of figurative art worldwide," says Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Conard speculates from the exaggerated sexual features that the 6-centimetre-high figurine might have been a fertility symbol. A small loop where the head should be suggests that it may have been hung on a string and worn as a pendant. He points out that the previous oldest female "Venus" figurines are from about 27,000 years ago.

Jill Cook, who curates and studies ancient figurines at the British Museum in London, says that the implications go way beyond art by showing that our ancestors of 32,000 to 35,000 years ago had brains just like ours.

"It shows that people at this time in Europe had reached a stage in development of the brain which enabled objects to be symbolised and abstracted," she says. "You're dealing with a mind like ours, but simply a different time and environment."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17121-ivory-venus-is-first-depiction-of-a-woman.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJqh6au7Ol0