Sir

In his News & Views article 'Origins of the female image' (Nature 459, 176–177; 2009), Paul Mellars describes the 35,000-year-old figurine of a woman, carved from a piece of mammoth ivory, as “explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman, with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs) that by twenty-first century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic”.

Mellars has, of course, never been pregnant. Anyone who has would know that breasts of that size (given the unavailability of surgical intervention at the time) are evident only in the late stages of pregnancy and during lactation. Likewise, it seems a stretch to imagine that a woman who was eking out an existence many millennia ago would be carrying around so much extra body fat — unless her “bloated” belly and thighs were the result of a pregnancy. Also, a “greatly enlarged” vulva is one of the more obvious ramifications of an infant making its way through a passage narrower than its head.

For this reader, the figurine speaks across the ages of fertility, not sexuality, and certainly not of pornography. It could have been carved as a pendant in the hope that it would provide its wearer with a talismanic connection to the power and mystery of creation — and not, as media headlines have described it, as a piece of “prehistoric porn”.

It is unfortunate, then, that the figure accompanying Mellars's piece is captioned “A 35,000-year-old sex object”. By the time it appeared in Nature's video archive, its title had become the rather more risqué “Prehistoric pin-up”. And when the story hit the Internet, this groundbreaking discovery of the oldest piece of figurative art known to humankind was labelled “'Porn' art in ivory, 35,000 years old”.

This misguided focus on a salacious interpretation has caused a cascade effect that trivializes and coarsens a monumental scientific and artistic discovery.