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Name : Dolní Věstonice Portrait Head
What it is : A nerve carved out of mammoth ivory
A portrait of a Stone Age woman carved out of ivory
Where it is from : The South Moravian part of the Czech Republic
When it was made : About 24000 B.C.
link : Bayeux Tapestry : A 1,000 - year - honest-to-goodness embroidery depicting William the Conqueror ’s victory and King Harold ’s grisly death
What it tells us about the past tense :
This sculpture , discovered at the archeological web site of Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic in the 1920s , is considered the oldest surviving portrait of a someone anywhere in the human beings , at 26,000 years old .
Carved with Edward Durell Stone tool out of mammoth ivory , the tiny headland measure just 1.9 inch ( 4.8 centimeters ) tall and 1 inch ( 2.4 cm ) wide . The carving come along to typify a cleaning lady ’s side , with engraved eyes , a dimpled chin , and a rear nose and sassing . She may be wearing her hair in an updo or under a chapeau . Unlike other objects from the site — such as theVenus of Věstonice , which miss facial feature — this facial expression seems to be individualized , make it the other do it delineation of a specific person .
During the Upper Paleolithic period , a band of mammoth hunters place up bivouac atDolní Věstonice , which is now a small small town near the southern border of the Czech Republic . This clump of colony , sometimes called the " Stone Age Pompeii , " has give ten of thousands of ceramics , stone tools and osseous tissue objects over the preceding 100 of excavation , along with legion burials .
— Bad Dürrenberg headgear : An elaborate 9,000 - year - one-time headpiece worn by a female priest-doctor in Europe
— Doban - kun : A ' cute ' human - shaped enumeration tool from prehistorical Japan
— Dancing dwarf : A 2,300 - year - previous ancient Egyptian statue of a godlike world with a muscular 6 - pack
In one of these burials , covered inred ocherand array with 10 practice dodger tooth , excavator find the skeleton of a midway - of age adult female in 1949 . Her skull was asymmetric , potentially due to a traumatic childhood harm . When researchers used forensic techniques toreconstruct the woman ’s facefrom the skull in 2018 , they discovered it was very like to the diminutive ivory carving , whose left middle is importantly smaller than the right hand .
Dolní Věstonice is singular in Europe for its abundant artifacts go steady to the Late Gravettian stop ( 29000 to 24000 B.C. ) , including some of the earliest kiln - fired pottery in the world , so it is unsurprising that this niggling mind carve from mammoth ivory is probable theearliest personal portraitin the world .
Many artifact from Dolní Věstonice , including this sculpted drumhead , can be found on display at theAnthropos Pavilion , a museum in Brno , Czech Republic .
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