According to Muehlenbein the homogeneity of plump female “Venus” figurines carved out of bone, stone, ivory and clay by populations from western France to eastern Siberia points to cultural homogeneity across a vast expanse of land. The term Gravettian itself was born in 1938 after Dorothy Garrod published an article on the Upper Paleolithic, where the distribution of female statuettes was shown to correlate with the distribution map of Gravettian sites. The figurines date from to 30,000 to 21,000 BP depending on the region, which points to chronological homogeneity across sites . Through studying figurative Gravettian art researchers can come closer to understanding the origins of symbolic behaviour which is a crucial threshold in human cognitive evolution, which can tell us just as much about ourselves as about the people who made Paleolithic art. Through specific examples this essay will first contrast the style of some “Venus” figurines to determine whether the group is indeed uniform. This will be followed by a discussion on possible regional interactions, and on various interpretations for their production. The essay will end with a personal outlook on the interpretation of “Venus” figurines as not fully determinate but rather an attempt to represent and engage symbolically with the force of nature seen as feminine, making figurines proto-representations of ‘Mother Nature’.

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Figurines are found in clusters in south-western France, northern Italy, Moravia and the Russian Plain. Delporte solves the issue of female and male classification through conceptualising of a Pavlovian-Kostenkian-Gravettian (PKG) style which occurs in multiple clusters united by a name “female statuette zone” between two interstadials in Eastern Europe, 27,000 to 24,000 BP. PKG-style includes figurines from Dolni Vestonice, Kostenki, Khotlylevo, and Willendorf. The figurines from Central and Eastern Europe exhibit greater similarity within a group comparing to the equivalents from Western Europe. Soffer refers to them as belonging to Pavlov-Willendorf-Kostenki-Avdeevo (PWKA) culture. Nevertheless, there are intra-group variations...