Long before the ancient Greeks imagined Zeus taking the form of a swan and copulating with Princess Leda, the Natufians of Southwest Asia were also depicting the same thing. Archaeologists recently discovered fragments of 12,000-year-old fired clay sculptures from prehistoric settlements in Israel, which they claim represent an early belief system.
“When we took this small lump of clay out of the box, we immediately recognized a human figure and a bird lying on its back,” Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science in an email.
The figurine depicts a woman and a bird, likely a goose, and is the oldest known depiction of a woman from Southwest Asia, Davin and colleagues said in a study published Monday in the journal PNAS.
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During his research, Davin carefully examined tens of thousands of small clay fragments collected from several sites on Natuf Island. The Natufians were a sedentary hunter-gatherer culture found between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago in what is now Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
A small piece of crafted clay from an archaeological site called Nahal Ein Geb II, located about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) east of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, caught Davin’s attention.
“I knew I had an extraordinary piece, both in terms of the subject matter depicted and the quality of the 12,000-year-old sculpture,” Davin said. “The depiction of the human is the most complete and detailed representation of the human body ever identified in Natufian culture.”
This “extremely rare” clay figurine may be the world’s earliest representation of human-animal interaction, researchers detail in a study.
The statuette was modeled from a single clay block and was found fragmented into three parts, the researchers wrote in their study. It is only 1.5 inches (3.7 centimeters) tall and was heated in a fireplace before being covered in red rock paint.
At the top of the doll is a bird perched on the human’s back, its wings spread backwards and partially enveloping the human. A triangular incision at the bottom of the figurine probably represents a woman’s pubic bone, and symmetrical oval traces near the face suggest breasts. The bird was likely a goose, the researchers wrote, as animal bones found at the site suggest that the Natufians used geese for both food and decoration.
According to research, one possible interpretation of this figurine is that it depicts a hunter carrying a killed bird back to camp. However, because the female was leaning forward and the goose appeared to be alive, researchers support a more mythical explanation, in which a male goose mounts a crouching female and mates with her.
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“Imaginary interbreeding of human and animal spirits is known in many myths from historical periods around the world,” Davin says. “This new desire to represent women’s images may be related to the increasing importance of women in managing the spiritual practices of these communities.”
Davin also noticed that the figure had partial fingerprints. Based on the density of the fingerprint’s ridges compared to modern fingerprints made by people whose gender is known, this could indicate that this area was sculpted by a woman.
The statuette was discovered in an area of the property that had been used for burials, along with other unique deposits such as a child burial and a cache of human teeth, the researchers noted in their study.
Taken together, the features of this unusual figurine suggest that the Natufians created complex images and potentially expressed animistic beliefs prior to the Neolithic Revolution in Southwest Asia, when people began to settle permanently, grow crops, and keep livestock.
The woman and goose figurine therefore “bridges the world of nomadic hunter-gatherers and the world of the first settled communities, showing how imagination and symbolic thinking began to shape human culture,” study co-author Leore Grossman, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a statement.
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