This Venus figurine made of mammoth ivory was unearthed in 2008 in Hohle Fels, a cave near Schelklingen, Germany, in the Swabian Jura UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The figure is the oldest undisputed example of a depiction of a human being, being ca. 40,000 years old. In terms of figurative art only the lion-headed, zoomorphic Löwenmensch figurine is older. The Venus is housed at the Prehistoric Museum of Blaubeuren.

As the earliest image of a human being and the oldest piece of figurative art, the female figurine of Hohle Fels remains a significant discovery for understanding the development of symbolic behaviour in Homo sapiens. Discovered in southwestern Germany in 2008, this mammoth-ivory sculpture was found in several fragments and has always been ᴀssumed to be complete, never owning a head. In place of a head, there is instead a small loop that would allow her to be threaded, possibly to be worn as a pendant. Several hypotheses have been put forward as to her original use context, ranging from representing a fertility goddess to a pornographic figure. Yet none of these theses have ever suggested that she once had a head. Here we explore whether the female figurine of Hohle Fels was designed as a two-part piece, with the head made of perishable material culture, possibly woven plant or animal fibres; or that the artefact is a broken and reworked figurine with the head simply never found. By exploring the possibility that this figurine did originally have a second part—a head—we investigate issues surrounding the role of women and children in the Swabian Aurignacian.