Introduction: The hunter-gatherer’s who eked out a tenuous survival strategy during the last phases of the Bolling-Allerod Epipaleolithic period certainly procreated. These pre-literate peoples are the first to demonstrate sexual practices in artwork millennia prior to written language. The British movie of 1966 starring Raquel Welch as Loana, One Million Years BC failed to capture the sexuality of the caveman and cavewoman as well as this actual sculpted piece.
Methods: Much of the published writings on or about the Natufian cultures were gathered and utilized to better understand the sexual practices of these peoples. Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968) famed daughter and only surviving child of Archibald Garrod was the discoverer of the Natufian culture and peoples in 1928. Her mentor, Abbé Henri Breuil discovered a rare calcite statue, known as the “Ain Sakhri’ figurine that dates roughly to 9,000 BCE and identified by him to be Garrod’s Natufian culture.
Results: The figurine has undergone extensive investigations and was created upon a calcite cobble. It was sculptured to show a couple in coitus as well as being a phallic illustration. The artist utilized a pointed, probable stone chisel to remove pieces and make the delicate, copulating figures. The two entwined figures are locked in a forever intimate coital scene, presumably a female and a male, arms and legs wrapped around one another in a sitting position.
Conclusions: The origin of human sexuality is linked to the development of mankind itself, well documented by modern genetic paleoanthropological investigations into mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam. The hominin lineage has recently experienced a modern Renaissance with rapid expansion in our knowledge about the evolution within Africa, correctly hypothesized by Charles Darwin. …”the statuette…had never been above ground, where it would have faded and worn away; on the contrary it bore ash marks, evidence of an existing undisturbed level, but no of clay as it would have been the case if in a cave.” Eminent social anthropologists believe that sex cannot be understood except through its social and political setting may apply to primitive civilizations that have been studied in the modern era, but these rules have difficult applications to the paleolithic era. So little is known about the ancient Natufian culture that is pre-pottery, pre-literate, pre-metallurgy but obviously not pre-sexual or erotic.
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