Have you ever wondered what people looked like a long, long time ago? We can learn about their looks from their fossils, but we can also find ancient objects that show us what they thought they looked like.

One special object is called the Venus of Willendorf. It’s a small statue that was made a really, really long time ago. Workers found it in Willendorf, a place in Austria, when they were building a railroad. This statue is 25,000 years old!

The Venus of Willendorf is a little statue of a person. It has curly hair but no eyes, nose, or mouth. The arms are very tiny, but the breasts, bottom, and stomach are big.

Some people might think it’s not very pretty, but to the people who made it, it was very beautiful. In fact, we have found similar statues from that time in other places. Most of them are statues of women with big breasts and bottoms. Some people think they are statues of pregnant women. Back then, having babies and growing crops were really important, so people thought a big pregnant stomach showed that a woman was fertile and would have a lot of food.