A picture of phalluses was posted by the Twitter account Strange Facts on April 14 with the caption, "These dildos discovered in Germany are around 28,000 years old." The tweet also stated that they are thought to be the oldest sex toys ever discovered. Let us find out if this is true.
The picture shared by Strange Facts and their claim do not match. Because it is true that the oldest dildo was found in Germany and it is 28,000 years old. But the picture shared by Strange Facts does not show the phallus found in Germany. The dildos shown in the tweet picture are younger and were taken from a paper that researched about French archaeological sites.
World's Oldest Dildo
The world's oldest dildo was found by team of researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany in 2005. The discovery was made when the team was on an excavation duty at the Hohle Fels Cave in Germany. They had found 14 fractured parts of the phallus. The team put together all the parts and came to a conclusion that it was a phallus. Using the radiocarbon dates of animal bones the team declared that the artefact was aged between 30,000 and 26,000.
The eight inches long phallus was said to have been used for knapping flints. The researchers opined that it might have been used for rituals purpose and not as a sex toy or dildo.
The Fact
But the picture shared by Strange Facts does not match with the description of the phallus found in the Hohle Fels Cave. But the picture was used as a figure for a paper in the medical journal Urology that was published in 2009. The paper was about trying to find out how old the practice of circumcision was. It looked like the researchers used clues from the archaeological record to draw conclusions.
The caption of the picture states, "Portable art phallic pieces recovered from Castanet, La Madeleine, Blanchard, La Madeleine, Le Forne Du Diableand Roc De Marcamps [left to right]. These places are in France and not in Germany. Thus the picture shared by Strange Facts is the pieces of phalluses found in the above said archaeological sites in France.
Thus though the fact mentioned by Strange Facts is true [about world's oldest dildo being 28,000 years old], the picture does not correspond with the same. The picture they have used is of phalluses found in six archaeological sites in France.
