Prehistoric porn created in China 3,000 years ago

GlobalPost
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Author Mary Mycio says there’s "pornography" out there you can’t find on Google.

Of course, that’s because it is 3,000 years old and carved on the side of a rock wall in one of the most inhospitable regions of China.

Mycio wants you to see these images, and writes at Slate.com about the rock carvings that depict fascinating and enlightening representations of a fertility ritual; they’re some of the most graphic images ever revealed by scholars and might feature bisexual behavior.

Called the Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs, they were discovered roughly 25 years ago by Chinese archeologist Wang Binghua in the western Xinjiang Province.

“Google retrieves only a few results, depending on the spelling,” Mycio writes at Slate.com. “The petroglyphs deserve more attention.”

Jeannine Davis-Kimball, Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads director, has studied them extensively as the first westerner to see the images.

Davis-Kimball divided the sprawling petroglyphs into eight scenes. The drawings range from just a few inches to over nine feet tall.

Interspersed are men masturbating, spectators, animals, animal sacrifices and orgies.

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For example, the second scene features 10 women and six ithyphallic (erect) men “about to begin copulation,” Davis-Kimball writes.

“The most unusual figure in this scene is the one to the far left that most probably represents a shaman wearing a monkey-like mask,” she writes. “It has female-type antennae shooting from its head, wears a red ‘bra’ ... As it is ithyphallic it is also a bi-sexual representation and it appears that it about to copulate with a small female with splayed legs whose vulva is explicit.”

The carvings also carry political weight, Mycio said, because of how they alter our understanding about China’s earliest settlers.

The faces appear Caucasian or western and the images mirror some discovered 1,600 miles away in Ukraine.

China and ethnic Uyghur people are debating who has stronger claims to the region, but the archaeological evidence hasn’t answered any questions.

Discoveries of nearby mummies buried in graves marked similarly to the petroglyphs suggest the earliest settlers are neither Chinese nor Uyghur.

That’s a blessing for the scholars, who are under less political pressure and free to study the petroglyphs and nearby cemeteries featuring similar fertility icons.

It would seem the researchers, like the subjects they’re studying, are now free to get busy.

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