Why Paleolithic Venuses tended to be chubby.

Maybe Paleolithic Venuses tended to be chubby and round because the ones that were slim and lithe, were hard to make and easy to break and got shattered and thrown away.

To clarify, I know the standard explanation is that calories were rare in Paleolithic times and so really fat women would be seen as healthy and prosperous. I'm offering this as an alternative hypothesis not necessarily contradictory with that one but at least partially replacing that one.

I don't think that there is strong evidence that scarce calories were the primary limitation on Paleolithic human beings in terms of population or fertility. That's another topic, and certainly there was some of that but human beings had a lot of other important survival challenges and we were exceptionally good food gatherers. So much so that even modern hunter-gatherers typically only have to work about 4 hours a day to get all the calories and nutrients they need even though they live on some of the most marginal land that exists today and we have ecologically depleted the land.

If humans didn’t evolve in a context where we had extended periods of lack of calories, it seems unlikely that so many of us today would be so efficient at packing on the fat.

In any case, if a society had lots of calories and the women tended to be fat because of that, then we’d expect the Venus images to be fat, not thin.

And if women tended to be thin in real life, because calories were scarce (there hardly seems to be any other likely explanation), then we’d also expect Venus to be fat.

There doesn’t seems to be a scenario where it would make sense to not depict or image her fat. And presumably she also has exaggerated seconded sex characteristic, and that general is also going to imply some amount of being fat.

The fertility images in much later contexts, such as India, were more hourglass but all quite zaftig. As with Renaissance Europe.

I think that’s just how it is, post 1965 US norms notwithstanding.