Rock Art Research

Pre-Historic phalanges with anthropic holes through one side of their shafts have usually been interpreted as whistles. But identical bones are used by several peoples as human effigies — most commonly of women and babies. Distal limb bones with incised or sculpted heads, eyes, arms and vulvas prove that such bones were also interpreted anthropomorphically by Eurasian cultures in the past. The use of phalangeal figurines from central Siberia to Greenland also suggests that the practice spread around the Arctic from ancient sources. Ethnographic examples illustrate a few roles women have played in the region’s cold weather economies and how female effigies reflect such roles, but are not offered as strict analogies with Palaeolithic counterparts. Instead a case is made from new internal readings of several pre-Historic objects incorporating feminine imagery — including the ‘woman between reindeer hooves’ from Laugerie-Basse and an engraving from Étiolles — that some ancient feminine images reflect a vision of women in keeping with the division of labour in northern hunter-gatherer subsistence models. Economic necessities may partly explain how pregnancy and compact feminine effigies have been viewed ideologically in cold Eurasian areas for millennia. Finally, the possible existence of perforated phalanges from the Middle Palaeolithic and even earlier is noted and a protocol of tests is suggested for determining whether their holes are anthropic or natural. If any of the holes in these older specimens turn out to be manmade, then the conclusion that pre-Historic perforated phalanges are likely to be figurines will have to be extended to those made by archaic humans like Neanderthals.