Armagedgeek!

The Guardian (UK) for April 4 reports that

Stone-age figurines depicting what could be the oldest pornographic scene in the world have been unearthed in Germany.

Archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the 7,200-year-old remnants of a man having intercourse with a woman.

First they found the male figure, which they called Adonis. It is "the oldest male clay figurine ever discovered in the world." So they looked carefully at "every speck of soil for a whole month" and located what they believe to be the matching female figure.

Dr [Harald] Stäuble [of the Archaeological Institute of Saxony] said

"Adonis is bent forward and the female figure is bent forward even more.

"There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that they were doing a ritual dance...."

The other, "far more likely" possibility is that it represented some good (very) old-fashioned stand-up screwing.

The serious side to this is that until now, the oldest representations of sexual scenes were frescos from about 2,000 years ago. This shatters that record by more than 50 centuries.

Add the fact that the figures are "not stylistic, but realistic" and you have a major challenge to the prevailing view that sex was a taboo subject during the Stone age. It could even raise the possibility of needing to revisit the conviction that the clay figurines of women with "large breasts and bottoms" are necessarily fertility figures.