Ancient Statue Interpretations

Some years ago I saw an article on HN I think, where an archeologist comment on this.He said, paraphrasing:"You see, we keep finding those statues of penis, and people create crazy explanations of how it is a religions icon and whatnot. But know what? It is probably just a funny statue because people think making penis statues is hilarious."

The art is the evidence, no? Sculptures of a bird-headed man implies mythology, or at least imagination.

I often think of this kind of whimsical angle when I read other news stories about various archaeological and historical discoveries. There’s always so much discussion on how a particular statue is “the cultural center of the community” or that a jeweled box was of “great religious significance”.How do we know that the Elon Musk of 3000BC didn’t just build a big obelisk for the lulz?Probably a bigger question of the problems of inferring great significance from extremely few samples...

I guess you have not heard about the Venus figurines?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines

Yeah - the statues are not necessarily accurate depictions to begin with.

You don't think those statues catalyse the discussion?

You say that as if statues are any less ambiguous.

Because we don’t know if anything from archeology is “for ritual use (for real).” Sometimes people just do odd stuff because it’s cool. Mount Rushmore should make you wonder about giant ancient statues.In 10,000 years people might be looking a remnants of Christ the Redeemer statue and think it’s clearly for ritual use. But we know it isn’t for ‘ritual use (for real)’ so someone making such an obvious leap would be wrong, thus making other such seemingly obvious leaps could just a

No discussion in the article of how likely this is to be simply a coincidence?There's a ton of ancient artifacts depicting humans in fanciful and non-realistic ways, and a ton of diseases that affect the body. That two of these will happen to superficially coincide is basically guaranteed.The similarity here isn't even that great; if the statue had a huge goitre or something I'd be more inclined to buy it, but here it just looks like a little chubby squinting dude.

I wonder what its opinion is on the topic of graven images.