106 art: Europe Bird bone engraved with animal heads, Late Magdalenian, dating to about 10,500 c.e., from the cave of Courbet, Penne-Tarn, France (© The Trustees of the British Museum) that art had a transforming power—that the act of painting made whatever was depicted actually happen Thus, paintings that show hunting are thought to have been created to make a successful hunt become reality In some of the caves, paintings of animals show signs of having been struck repeatedly, as if by the points of spears, suggesting a ritual in which the hunt is made real by attacking the paintings On the other hand, the paintings may have had other purposes, and the paintings deep in caverns may have been the only ones found because they were out of the way of erosion by nature and humans Paintings on rocks outside caves and paintings near the entrances of caves could have been destroyed by wind, rain, and vandalism Those that have been found are fragile; even exhaled human breath damages them, so others may have existed in profusion only to be worn away over 15,000 to 30,000 years The paintings could have served as lists of game available in a region or as part of initiation rites for young people, like many works by the San (or Bushmen) in southern Africa The paintings of human beings in the caves also are puzzling to archaeologists Among the brilliantly detailed animal figures are ones of men who are graceless stick figures On occasion they appear to be hunting; on other occasions they may be dancing In the Lascaux Cave in France is a painting from 15,000 to 13,000 b.c.e of an apparently wounded or dead man, placed between a rhinoceros and a disemboweled bison He seems to be wearing a mask of a bird The only way to know he is male is from his prominent penis Why are the men portrayed so badly, while the animals are portrayed so beautifully? The answer is as yet unknown The problem becomes more complicated when the portraits of women are considered Many small stone carvings of women from the same era as the early paintings have been found They have been dubbed Venuses by archaeologists, in humorous reference to the Roman goddess of love and beauty The Venus of Willendorf from Austria, dating from 28,000 to 23,000 b.c.e., is the most famous of these figures She is carved from limestone and is only a little more than four inches high Her stomach, breasts, and thighs are huge, but her arms are small, with her hands resting atop her breasts Her head is covered by a cap or elaborately curled hair, so that her face does not show This sculpture may be a fertility symbol, with the breasts and stomach representing a woman’s ability to create new life There are other depictions of women, and many, like the Venus of Willendorf, are artistically superior to the depictions of men In the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, France, is a relief carving (with the figure projecting out from a flat background) of a woman from 23,000 to 20,000 b.c.e She is about 18 inches tall and is depicted from the front Like the Venus of Willendorf, her face is obscured by what may be locks of hair, and her breasts, stomach, and thighs are large Unlike the Venus of Willendorf, she has well-proportioned arms In her right hand she holds aloft a bison’s horn She is better detailed than the depictions of men from her era These Venuses suggest that their sculptors may have been from a matriarchal society or perhaps that women controlled the religious practices In addition to creating the earliest-known paintings and rock sculptures, the ice age peoples of Europe appear to have created the earliest clay sculpture In a cave at Ariège, France, are two clay bison, modeled in relief They each are about two feet in length and date from about 12,000 b.c.e Like their painted counterparts, they are in profi le and in the same graceful style MESOLITHIC: 9000–4000 B.C.E By about 9000 b.c.e Europe was warming, and the glacier over Britain had disappeared; Scandinavia, however, was still under a glacier, and Britain was still attached by land to the rest of Europe Mammoths and rhinoceroses no longer lived in Europe, and reindeer had moved northward, followed by the ancestors of the Lapps, who eventually would populate northern Finland Some of the major cultural groups that