© Peter Watson 2017 Russia is a female figure with 28 red dots between her legs, very possibly a reference to the menstrual cycle. At Mal’ta, in Siberia, Soviet archaeologists discovered houses divided into two halves. In one half only objects of masculine use were found; in the other half female statuettes were located. Does this mean the houses were divided according to gender? Whether some of these early ‘sexual images’ have been over-interpreted, it nonetheless remains true that sex is one of the main images in early art, and that the depiction of female sex organs is far more widespread than the depiction of male organs. In fact, there are no depictions of males in the Gravettian period and this would therefore seem to support the claims of the distinguished Lithuanian archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), that early humans worshipped a ‘great goddess’, rather than a male god. The development of such beliefs probably had something to do with what at the time would have been the great mystery of birth, the wonder of breast-feeding, and the disturbing occurrence of menstruation. At that time, birth would have been truly miraculous, and early people may have thought that, in order to give birth, women received some spirit from the animals. Until the link was made between sexual intercourse and birth, woman would have seemed mysterious and miraculous creatures, far more so than men. Is this why there are no images of males, or the male function, in Gravettian art? Randall White is surely correct in his argument that there must have been a time when ancient humans had not made the link between sexual intercourse and birth, 280 days of human pregnancy (on average, from the end of menstruation to parturition) being just too long a delay for such a link to be inferred. My argument attempts to explain why the Venus figurines were only ever carved – in ivory or stone – and hardly ever painted on cave walls; and why, often, they lacked hands and feet, or these features were highly stylized. These figurines were carved because they had to be portable: the clan or tribe took the statuettes with them as they followed the herds, and the figurines were carved in such a way that only the important, practical features were included. Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul Barber, in their book, When they Severed Earth from Sky: How the Mind Shapes Myth, have convincingly shown how many common myths are based on fairly accurate observations of ancient peoples of phenomena they thought important and yet used mental devices still familiar to us to remember those phenomena and warn their descendants. The Barbers show how giants are to be understood as volcanoes, or the remains of