January 13th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Dildos From Fourteen Thousand Years Ago
What did dildos look like 14 kilo-years ago? Mashable offers this picture, and a few others even older:
The article also tells us that squeamish archaeologists have been in the habit of referring to phallic artifacts as “batons”, or in the case of the ones from 30,000 years ago, “ice-age batons.” Now I’m picturing “ice-age orchestras” and “ice-age parades” — damn you, squeamish archaeologists!
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I don’t believe the scientists are ‘squeamish’. They just don’t have any concrete evidence that would prove that was their purpose. If we all just assume they are dildos and start calling them dildos, pretty soon we forget that their dildoness was ever in question. Once you’ve done this, you’ve stopped doing science.
For them to be *not* dildos, you’d have to be making the assertion that whatever else they were for, they never got used as dildos. From our knowledge of human nature, we know that’s true of no other phallic object. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to assert that their dildoness was ever in question.
I am thinking of ice-age baton-twirling competitions. Beats working.
My grandfather was an anthropologist and had a bunch of these sitting around his basement. This was also where the fold out sofa was that I slept on when visiting. As a teenager I once took some liberties with a couple of the artifacts. It is an experience that I still treasure for its relative uniqueness.
Sexual pleasure is arguably one of the strongest motivators known to man. People who don’t carve or whittle, are most likely to experiment in that area by creating their own dildo. When I was in art school, one fellow had covered an entire wall of his studio in various shaped and sized dildos that he had carved from crooked hardwood branches. One need only look at the hundreds of choices one has these days in commercially manufactured dildo sizes and shapes to realize the rampant curiosity man has in this area. I doubt seriously that ancient man was using these “batons” to conduct an orchestra…
If you’re having a hard time seeing these as sex toys, you might want to keep in mind that several of them are rather accurate representations of well-known animal penises…
A web search of photo images from the Icelandic Phallological Museum might be useful to get you started…
Further web searching into many commercially available replica animal-penis dildos will give you an idea of why these were popularly created in antiquity…
My bet is “items of religious significance”. Which doesn’t rule out these stone phalli were *also* used as dildos, sure. In fact, I’m now picturing them _ritually and ceremonially_ employed as dildos, but that may just be me indulging a fancy fantasy of mine…
Fertility cults go Way back in human history, it’s what a true Conservative would believe in ;-)
I’m just saying that as a scientist, the level of evidence required to make such a positive affirmation is a little higher than that required in internet discourse.
Before prehistoric man became sophisticated enough to understand reproduction, he only had sex for pleasure. If he hadn’t had a lot of sex, none of us would be here. We all owe our very existence on our horny ancestors. Even today, most sex occurs for purposes of pleasure.
The design, manufacture, and sales of millions of dildos shows that we enjoy self-pleasuring today and I can imagine no reason why our ancestors would enjoy self-pleasuring any less. The poor folk used zucchini, cucumbers, gourds, or daikon radishes. Whatever grew in their environment. Others, with more leisure time on their hands, made dildos out of more permanent substances, or traded for them with craftsmen who could.
Science tells us that the simplest answer is most often correct… Occam’s (or Ockham’s) razor.
[…] for the historical importance and social significance of dildos. These stalwart constructs of stone and bone and bronze and leather and rubber and plastic have been fashioned by human artisans for nigh on […]