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Earliest depicted human coital positions
According to L. Legrain in "Ur Excavations, Vol. III: Archaic Seal Impressions"
(1936), the oldest known
depiction of human coitus, in the Ur excavations in Mesopotamia, dates to between 3200 and
3000 B.C. But
much older than this are the representations of coital activity on the walls of the Grotte des
Combarelles in the
Dordogne in France. One particular drawing is thought to date from the Aurignacian period of
the late Old Stone
Age, about 40,000. If there are more ancient depictions than this we do not know of them.
What do we know of the first positions shown for coital activity? In the most ancient
drawing, the one in the
Dordogne, the woman is shown crouching forward while the man approaches her from behind.
According to
Havelock Ellis the oldest picture of human coitus that we have - of the Palaeolithic Solutrian
age - shows the man
as supine while the woman squats (in fact the Solutrian, or Solutrean age, ante-dates the
Aurignacian). One
prehistoric rock drawing, this time from Bohusian in Sweden, shows two couples standing up
and copulating.
And the seals from Ur of the Chaldees (around 3000 B.C.) have the copulating pair with the
woman on top of
the man. Kinsey et al have pointed out that the position with the woman above is common in
ancient art, e.g. that
of Peru, India, China, Japan and other civilizations. Perhaps the most famous of all the
palaeolithic sexual
depictions are those to be found in the Les Trois Freres cavern: a human figure, wearing an
animal skin and
antlers, is crouching, his genitals clearly shown (this drawing has often been cited as evidence
of early witchcraft).
Elsewhere in Trois Freres is an ithyphallic bison with human legs. And half-human, half-animal
depictions are
shown to suggest sexual mounting. A bone engraving from the Abri Murat (Lot) is based on
the same theme.
And in Pech Merle there is a finger drawing in clay of a woman "crouched in a sexually
receptive posture beneath
animal-like lines". (See P. Rawson, "Primitive Erotic Art").
From The Illustrated Book of Sexual Records.
© 1974, 1982, 1997-2001 G.L. Simons
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