The Meaning of Stone Age Porn

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes a Der Spiegel story about XXX archeology, specifically a cache of seemingly pornographic figures near Leipzig.

The only depictions of sexual activity known until now were Greek paintings, but they were created more than 4,000 years later. Given this enormous difference in time, the Saxony find has created some confusion. Some believe it was a toy. Archäo, a professional journal, speculates that it may have been "chic" to display these types of sculptures in the "houses of the first farmers between the Saale and Elbe rivers." Researchers speculate that the figure could also be evidence of a "fertility cult"—a theory that sounds as straightforward as it is vague….

But how should researchers interpret these recent finds? The discoveries have reopened an old rift in the academic world, in which two camps are at odds over a fundamental issue. The question they're quarreling over is this: Did our ancestors live relaxed and uninhibited lives, or was asceticism the order of the day in the primeval age?

The two sides of the debate are clearly defined: Socio-biologists believe that the early hominids were basically promiscuous, and that they spent their lives running around the fields and woods of their day, constantly in pursuit of sex, following the genetic dictates of their rampant hormones. The other side of the equation are those—sometimes referred to as "tabooists"—who assume that even early man lived under a strict system of sexual abstinence, and that the sex lives of Neanderthal man were everything but orgiastic.

Whole story here.