It seemed that humans from all over the world had agreed. But it was something spontaneous. Around 50,000 years ago, our ancestors in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia developed the first examples of figurative art. First they drew the animals in their environment and little by little they expanded their repertoire.
In Mongolia, about 42,000 years ago, someone had no better idea than to represent phalluses. Several were made and used to build a pendant. “Hunter-gatherer communities used sexual anatomical attributes as symbols at a very early stage of their dispersal in this region,” explain the researchers from the University of Bordeaux in an article published in the journal Scientific Reports.
This unique piece of ornament was found in 2016 in a layer dating to the Upper Paleolithic from the Tolbor-21 archaeological site, in the Khangai Mountains of northern Mongolia. Three-dimensional phallic pendants were hitherto unknown in the Paleolithic record, and furthermore, it predates the earliest known sexed anthropomorphic representation, archaeologists say.
The necklace, they add in the study, was produced during a period of time in which Homo sapiens supposedly converged with the Denisovans, and it has been discovered precisely in a region of the planet where such encounters “are plausible”, say the French experts.
The approximately four centimeters long stone was carved by a human. Originally called simply T21, recent analyzes of the material around it suggest the ornament dates to between 42,400 and 41,900 years ago.
It was two small slits that caught the attention of the research team. One of them wraps around the middle section of the stone and the other runs its entire length from top to bottom. Investigators suspect the grooves were “to make it look like a human penis.”
Additionally, archaeologists suggest that the midsection groove was meant to represent the glans penis, while the top-to-bottom groove was meant to replicate the look of the urethral opening.
The researchers noted that the other side of the stone is quite shiny, indicating a lot of rubbing against a soft material. They suggest that this soft material was probably human skin, as the stone was hung around the neck and worn as a pendant.
The midsection slit could “have been made for no other reason than to allow a string to be attached to hang around the neck,” says Solange Rigaud, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux. With the sculpture being accepted as representing a penis it becomes the oldest known example of a carved phallus.
Until now, the oldest representation of a penis has been found in Germany and is half as old as the Mongolian phallus: approximately 28,000 years.