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The Venus of Willendorf is a small statue estimated to have been made around 29,500 years ago. It was recovered on August 7, 1908 from an archaeological dig conducted at a Paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria.

Similar sculptures, first discovered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are traditionally referred to in archaeology as "Venus figurines", due to the widely held belief that depictions of nude women with exaggerated sexual features represented an early fertility deity, perhaps a mother goddess. The reference to Venus is metaphorical, since the figurines predate the mythological figure of Venus by many thousands of years.

See also: Venus figure

Venus of Willendorf - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia