© Peter Watson 2017 The only remains found in the caves where there are paintings, are those of clay lamps, used to provide light. In other caves and rock shelters, however, where there is very little art, there are the remains of gazelles and other small animals that the hunter-gatherers ate. They wouldn’t eat in the refuges, the places of sanctuary, because the smell of the animal remains would have attracted predators, precisely what they wanted to avoid. This is all intellectually consistent, so far as it goes. But there was one other overriding reason why the early hunter-gatherers needed special protection in the painted caves. It is where they went when women needed to give birth. This argument is amplified in Chapter 2. Chapter 2: The Venus Figurines Cave paintings were not the only form of hunter-gatherer ‘art’. The widespread depiction of the female form in very early Palaeolithic art, the so-called ‘Venus figurines’, is also well known. They are found in a shallow arc along the mammoth steppe, stretching from France to Siberia, the majority belonging to the Gravettian period – around 25,000 years ago but overall they date from 35,000 to 11,000 years ago. There has been, inevitably perhaps, much controversy about these figures. Many of them are buxom, with large breasts and bellies, possibly indicating they are pregnant. Many have distended vulvas, indicating they are about to give birth. Many are naked. Many lack faces but show elaborate coiffures. Many are incomplete, lacking feet or arms, as if the creator had been intent on rendering only the sexual characteristics of these figures. Some, but not all, were originally covered in red ochre – was that meant to symbolize (menstrual) blood? Some figures have lines scored down the back of their thighs, perhaps (it has been suggested) indicating the breaking of the waters during the birth process. Some critics, such as the archaeologist Paul Bahn, have argued that we should be careful reading too much sex into these figures, that it tells us more about modern palaeontologists than it does about ancient humans. Nevertheless, other early art works do suggest sexual themes. There is a natural cavity in the Cougnac cave at Quercy in the Cahors region of France which suggests (to the modern eye) the shape of a vulva, a similarity which appears to have been apparent also to ancient people, for they stained the cave with red ochre ‘to symbolize the menstrual flow’. Among the images found in 1980 in the Ignateva cave in the southern Urals of