The article also mentions a child's fingerprint surviving in a clay figurine. This comment section is pretty wild; the article is pretty clear that there is a

The article also mentions a child's fingerprint surviving in a clay figurine. This comment section is pretty wild; the article is pretty clear that there is a lack of consensus and multiple competing theories, yet so many comments seem to pick a single theory and run with that in exclusion of others. Given that these figurines were being produced for over 10k years with a global distribution, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that multiple mutually exclusive interpretations could have been true in different places and times. And, hell, Barbie. In the last 100 years, we have observed a doll in the form of an adult woman go from being successfully marketed to adult men, to being successfully marketed to young girls. Why would we assume these Venus figurines had a single purpose?