Olmec Sculptures of the Human Fetus

Leg Length, Body Proportion, Health and Beauty1

“…Historical artwork, sculpture and anatomical drawings from Renaissance Europe 42,43 and pre-Columbian Mexico 44 show fundamental commonalities in the depiction of body shape of late-term fetuses, newborns and infants. Discrete populations of living humans, however, present a diversity of body sizes and shapes.…”

Tlatilco Sculptures, Diprosopus, and the Emergence of Medical Illustrations

“…Of particular relevance is the fact that the contemporaneous Olmec, with whom the Tlatilcans had cultural affinities, were the first civilization to portray the existence of fetuses visually as well as to fashion an image of the human heart [15,18]. Also, both the Olmec and the Tlatilcans created images of dwarfs, hunchbacks, and yoga-like contortionists (engaged in disciplined posture) who may have had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome [19].…”

“…The first humans were said to have been born of sacred maize, and the metamorphosis and the developmental cycles of both humans and maize were considered parallel [15]. 7 To a marked extent corn represented a sign and symbol in both the cultural life and cosmology of many native American groups even before it became a dietary staple [56].…”

“…But there is a particularly immediate precedent for this iconographic joining: de la Fuente, in her integrated study of sculptural themes, reveals that both naturalism and abstraction coexisted in human form among the Olmec [13]. The Tlatilco artists simply combined two great principles in small figurines: the universality of style (anamorphic extremities) with the objective reality (anomalous faces) of the times [15,18]. 9 On the other hand, instead of what may appear to be stylistic inconsistency, other explanations are possible-including the Tlatilco artists' individual manipulation of the different physical parts, thus simply uniting at random various forms of malformation.…”

“…In contrast to the Olmec, who repeatedly sculpted the fetus realistically, the Tlatilco sculptors have avoided the fetal or neonatal form in favor of the pubescent [15]. Is it possible that the artists elaborated a live and youthful vehicle for the birth defect in order to personify diprosopus which would be analogous to the later Maya practice of personifying disease [80, p. xi-xiii]?…”