Sex toys have definitely come a long way these past years, but as it turns out, they’re probably not as modern as you’d be tempted to think. Last week, an object carved out of antler bone was excavated from Sweden and it made archaeologists scratch their head quite a lot… and chuckle: the object has an unmistakable look of a penis. Although scientists have yet to be sure about what it was used for, it’s hard not to jump to conclusions.

“Your mind and my mind wanders away to make this interpretation about what it looks like – for you and me, it signals this erected-penis-like shape,” said archaeologist Gšran Gruber of the National Heritage Board in Sweden, who worked on the excavation. “But if that’s the way the Stone Age people thought about it, I can’t say.”

Still, the resemblance is… uncanny.

“Without doubt anyone alive at the time of its making would have seen the penile similarities just as easily as we do today,” wrote Swedish archaeologist Martin Rundkvist on his blog

Another idea was that it was used as a tool, such as to “chip flakes of flint”, researchers suggested, because the… other end was quite sharp. Even more interesting, it could be used as this IN ADDITION to its sexual purpose, which would make things so much more interesting.

Either way, Martin Rundkvist sums things up quite nicely:

But without doubt anyone alive at the time of its making would have seen the penile similarities just as easily as we do today. If it is actually a pressure-flaker for fine flint knapping, then this would tell us something about how such work was conceptualised in terms of gender.

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