It might be possible that a group may have kept a successful female procreator overly well fed, protected and indeed worshipped. Some women may not have been as successful at delivering healthy offspring and others more so. They may have been highly valued and deemed to be very special tribe members, even Goddesses of reproduction. Perhaps there was a day when tribal rites included defining and fattening up just such a lady. Perhaps she was a point of pride.

These types of fertility statues have been found elsewhere. This just happens to be the oldest. They are all quite rotund and heavy breasted. Obviously ancient obesity was not problematic but it may have been a special goal reserved for that very special gal.

Just out of curiousity, are you into feederism?

These types of fertility statues have been found elsewhere. This just happens to be the oldest. They are all quite rotund and heavy breasted.

Well, sure. But so are those headless, armless, and legless drawings of women in bathroom stalls all over the world. These figurines don't look much different, maybe a little more talent was put into them.

I must say that I had never heard the term 'feederism' so I looked it up. No that is not for me. I am, however, a leg man if that is of any interest.

Actually having seen these statues before I wondered about the stature of the person they were modeled on. I do think that prehistoric peoples could be relatively accurate in their depictions and they all do share these same characteristics. I seriously believed that they learned that nutrition enhanced survivability of a pregnancy and produced more viable offspring. I doubt that they understood types of nutrition and just went with lots of nutrition and that was more successful than less nutrition.

I had learned (a long time ago) in college anthro that some experts thought perhaps the Venus figurines were carved by women themselves. In looking down at one's body a woman would see more curves - kind of an exaggerated view of the sexual characteristics of the body. And those figurines were eventually used for whatever 'the talk' used to consist of with young women in the society. It never occurred to me that there may have been a fetishized obese woman in the group...

I think it's pretty simple. If they were modeled on persons, then they would vary, since people vary. But they are all pretty much the same, more or less, so they could not have been modeled on individual persons.

They are just standardized icons, like cartoon figures.

But even that explanation does not suffice. First of all a human female can only bare 1 maybe 2 children every 9 months if she didn't die during childbirth. ( This is one explanation why human males like to chase different women.) So having only 1 female be the matriarch of a clan would not make any sense.

Not even taking into account just how valuable calories were in the days before agriculture. I mean it was real work not starving to death. A human beaing would maybe eat a few hundred calories per day and it was a rare day indeed when they were full after they ate.

It probably wasn't until the advent of city-states and agriculture and the rise of kings that a Human Being even had the opportunity to become fat.

Plus usually the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

In my experience some women are more successful in getting pregnant, sustaining a viable pregnancy and delivering healthy offspring. Large families and multiple pregnancies were normal in 19th century America. My own great grandmother had 8 surviving children and at least 2 others that died in childbirth.

The appearances of these statues do reflect a maternal person that I think was unusually successful in childbearing. It may have been just symbolic of a body style indicative of this sort of person, a target figure for the prolific mother.

I would agree that getting that volume of additional calories into anyone had to be a challenge. But there was animal fats and marrow, both high in calories. And body composition is always a matter of calories in versus calories burned. Between hormones and a sequestered, sedentary lifestyle the matriarch could have gotten heavy.

It was a time when life typically lasted 30 to 40 years. They had a high turnover of people and needed a high rate of reproduction. The women who excelled at the reproductive duty (if you will) could well have been crucial to the survival of the clan. Like the queens of termite and ant colonies their health might have been to focus of the clan. Feed the matriarch first and feed her well.