Bone statuette found in the Riparo Gaban near Martignano, Trento, Italy (dating to 4500 B.C.), now in the Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali (Museum of Natural Sciences), Trento, Italy. The figure is highly stylized and the sexual organ is particularly emphasized: from it a sign in the shape of a tree seems to emerge, perhaps representing a linkage between the fecundity of the earth and that of the woman. This link recalls some mythical traditions, found especially among contemporary Indonesian peoples, which ascribe the origin of the food plants from the body of a female being, put to death and transformed into the vegetable. The food plants are thus sacred, because they derive from the body of an ancestral being who established the solidarity between the fertility of the earth and female fecundity (Eliade 1976).

[Image: Cohen 2003]