The Stone Age hunters and collectors had therefore made a long journey on foot with it before it was lost in the Wachau and 30,000 years later, in 1908, it was excavated. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The female figure, almost eleven centimeters tall, was probably a symbol of fertility and good luck for its owners at the time. It is the only one of its kind made from a porous rock called “oolite” (egg stone). A team led by Gerhard Weber from the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna has now examined Venus with a high-resolution micro-computed tomography device.
From near Lake Garda
The results obtained indicate that Venus came with a probability bordering on certainty near the town of Ala, not far from Lake Garda in northern Italy. According to the Viennese researchers, the rock samples from there could not be statistically distinguished from those from Venus. Accordingly, the figurine made a journey of hundreds of kilometers from south of the Alps to the Danube region north of the Alps. Presumably this migration took many years or even generations. The researchers also learned a lot about the inner workings of Venus: “The oolite consists of nothing but small, sticky stones,” says Weber. The individual stones, in turn, were created by lime deposits on tiny grains. Storage over millions of years has caused these inner granules to dissolve in Venusian rocks. This makes it very porous and easier to work with than “hard through and through” rock.
Source: Nachrichten
