Engravings of Female Genitalia May Be World's Oldest Cave Art
Since their discovery in 1994, the spectacular paintings of lions, rhinos, and other animals in southern France's Chauvet Cave have stood out as the oldest known cave art, clocking in at about 37,000 years old.* But there have been occasional sightings of other cave art that is equally ancient, although its dating has been more uncertain. Now a team working at another site in the south of France claims to have discovered what appear to be engravings of female genitalia that are as old as or older than Chauvet, possibly making them the world's most ancient cave art.
Homo sapiens first colonized Europe from Africa around 40,000 years ago. But until the early 1990s, there was little firm evidence that our species engaged in sophisticated artistic activity that early. Many archaeologists assumed that modern humans developed their artistic skills only gradually, culminating in spectacular galleries like the 15,000-year-old painted caves at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. The discovery of Chauvet changed all that and convinced most researchers that early artists had brought their skills with them from Africa.
SNIP....
One key difference, White says, is that whereas the paintings at Chauvet are hidden deep within that cave and away from living areas, the depictions at Abri Castanet were on the rock shelter ceiling right above the spaces where prehistoric humans slept and ate, making them a kind of everyday and public art.
Harold Dibble, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says the team's dating of the vulva engraving appears sound because it cannot be any younger than the surface onto which it fell and might even be older. "The context of the find is quite clear," Dibble says. As for the long-standing tradition among archaeologists working in France of interpreting such images as vulvas, Dibble says, "Who the hell knows" what they really represent? Dibble adds that such interpretations could be colored by the worldview of Western archaeologists whose culture probably differs greatly from that of prehistoric peoples. "Maybe it's telling us more about the people making those interpretations" than the artists who created the images, Dibble says. On the other hand, he says, the repeated use of this image at other sites in the Vezere valley suggests that it was some sort of "shared iconography" that might identify specific groups of people. Indeed, archaeologists have also identified differences in the styles of personal ornaments and other artifacts that might also reflect different groups or tribes, much as people express their group identities by the way they dress today.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/05/engravings-of-female-genitalia.html
The artwork can be seen at the link on the photo on the right.
Looks like ancient aliens to me though
= new reply since forum marked as read
Someone get Catherine MacKinnon into that cave and SHUT IT DOWN!
the apology was for giving you a link. 
Know that there is a smutty outcropping of 5,000 yr old patriarchal oppression that needs to be stamped out.
Just tryin to help!
Like this:
much less a stone carving
why should i do anything about it?
Some cops will be breaking down your door for downloading kiddie porn!
looks familiar ...
Barrier Canyon pictographs (painted, not pecked) -- 500 BC to 500 AD
But maybe that's just my architectural orientation.
... is just a cave.
Duggar's Cave?
The Paleolithic period extends from 2.5 million years ago to the introduction of agriculture around 10,000 BCE. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans migrated to the Western Hemisphere before the end of the Paleolithic. It is the prehistoric era distinguished by the development of stone tools, and covers the greatest portion of humanity's time on Earth.
While most Paleolithic figurines are from the Upper Paleolithic, the Venus of Berekhat Ram found at Berekhat Ram on the Golan Heights is a Middle Paleolithic artefact of the later Acheulian possibly made by Homo erectus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_goddess
The Venus of Dolní Věstonice, one of the earliest known depictions of the human body, dates to approximately 29,000–25,000 BC (Gravettian culture of the Upper Paleolithic era)
