They discover where the stone of the famous Venus of Willendorf comes from

The almost 11 cm tall figure of Venus from Willendorf (Austria), found in 1908 and dated at 25,000 years, is carved in stone that probably comes from northern Italy.

It is the conclusion of an analysis with high resolution imaging tomography conducted by the University of Vienna. This casts supermodern new light south and north of the Alps. The results appear in Scientific Reports.

The Venus of Willendorf is not only special in terms of its design, but also in terms of its material. While other Venus figures are usually made of ivory or bone, sometimes also of different stones, oolite was used for the Lower Austrian Venus, which is unique for this type of cult object. The statuette found in the Wachau in 1908 and exhibited in the Natural History Museum in Vienna has so far only been examined from the outside.

Now, more than 100 years later, anthropologist Gerhard Weber of the University of Vienna has used a new method to examine its interior: micro-computed tomography. Over several passes, the scientists obtained images with a resolution of up to 11.5 micrometers, a quality otherwise only seen under a microscope. The first idea you get is: “Venus doesn’t look uniform at all inside. A special property that could be used to ”says the anthropologist in a statement.

Together with the two geologists Alexander Lukeneder and Mathias Harzhauser from the Vienna Natural History Museum, who had previously worked with oolites, the team evaluated them. A complex project: rock samples were obtained from France to eastern Ukraine, from Germany to Sicily, sawn and examined under a microscope.

Tomographic data from Venus showed that sediments were deposited on the rocks in different densities and sizes. In the middle were also small remains of shells and six larger, denser grains, called limonites. The latter explains the previously mysterious hemispherical cavities on the surface of Venus with the same diameter: “The hard limonites probably sprouted when the creator of Venus was carving them”Weber explains. “In the case of the navel of Venus, he apparently made it a virtue out of necessity.”

Another finding: Venusian oolite is porous because the nuclei of the millions of globules (ooids) that make it up had dissolved. This is a great explanation as to why the ingenious sculptor: he is so much easier to work with. The scientists also identified a small shell remnant, just 2.5 millimeters long, and dated it to the Jurassic period. This ruled out all other potential deposits of the rock from the much later Miocene geological age, such as those in the nearby Vienna Basin.

The research team also analyzed the grain sizes of the other samples. Hundreds, sometimes even thousands of grains were marked and measured with image processing programs or even manually. None of the samples within a 200-kilometer radius of Willendorf even remotely matched. Analysis ultimately showed that the samples from Venus were statistically indistinguishable from samples from a location in northern Italy, near Lake Garda. This is remarkable because it means that Venus (or at least the material part of it) began a journey from south of the Alps to the Danube north of the Alps.

“The people of the Gravettian, the tool culture of the time, sought out and inhabited favorable places. when i changed they moved, preferably along the rivers”, explains Gerhard Weber. Such a journey could have taken generations.

One of two possible routes from south to north would lead around the Alps and into the Pannonian plain and was described in simulations by other researchers a few years ago. The other way to get from Lake Garda to Wachau would be through the Alps. It is not clear if this was possible more than 30,000 years ago due to the deterioration of the climate that began at that time. This would be a rather unlikely variant if there had already been continuous glaciers at that time. However, the 730 km path along the Etsch, the Inn and the Danube was always below 1,000 meters above sea level, with the exception of 35 km at Lake Reschen.

Statistics clearly point to northern Italy as the origin of the Venusian oolite. However, there is another interesting place for the origin of the rock. It’s in eastern Ukraine, more than 1,000 linear miles from Willendorf. Like Italy, but better than all the rest of the sample.

An interesting connection here: Venus figures were found in the vicinity of southern Russia, which are somewhat younger, but closely resemble the Venuses found in Austria. The genetic results also show that people from Central and Eastern Europe were connected to each other at that time.