Long before the ancient Greeks imagined Zeus taking the form of a swan to mate with Princess Leda, the Natufians of Southwest Asia depicted the same thing. Archaeologists recently discovered a 12,000-year-old sculptured piece of baked clay at a prehistoric settlement in Israel that they say represents an early belief system.
“When I took this small piece of clay out of the box, I immediately recognized a human figure, and then a bird lying on its back,” Laurent Davinarchaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science in an email.
The figurine depicts a woman and a bird (presumably a goose) and is the earliest known depiction of a woman in Southwest Asia, Davin and his colleagues wrote in a study published Monday (Nov. 17) in the journal. PNAS.
During his investigation, Davin carefully examined tens of thousands of small clay fragments collected from several Natufian archaeological sites. The Natufians were a sedentary hunter-gatherer culture inhabiting what is now Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago.
One tiny piece of man-made clay from an archaeological site called Nahal Ein Gev II, located about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) east of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, caught Davin's attention.
“I realized that I was holding in my hand an exceptional thing, both in terms of the object depicted and in terms of the quality of the model, created 12,000 years ago,” Davin said. “The image of a man is the most complete and detailed depiction of the human body that has yet been discovered in the Natufian culture.”
An “extremely rare” clay figurine may be the world's earliest depiction of human-animal interaction, researchers detailed in a study.
The figurine was sculpted from a single piece of clay and was found broken into three parts, the researchers wrote in the study. Measuring just 1.5 inches (3.7 centimeters) tall, it was heated in a fireplace and then coated with red mineral pigment.
The upper part of the figurine depicts a bird resting on the back of a man, its wings spread back and partially enveloping the man. The incised triangular area at the bottom of the figurine likely represents a woman's pubis, and the symmetrical oval imprints near the face suggest breasts. The researchers write that the bird is most likely a goose, as animal bones discovered at the site suggest that the Natufians used geese for both food and decoration.
According to the study, one possible interpretation of the figurine is that it depicts a hunter transporting a killed bird back to camp. But because the woman is leaning forward and the goose appears alive, researchers prefer a more mythological explanation: a male goose mates with a squatting female by mounting her.
“The imaginary mating of human and animal spirits is known in many myths from historical periods around the world,” Davin said. “This emerging desire to represent female figures may be related to the growing importance of women in guiding the spiritual practices of these communities.”
Devin also noticed a partial fingerprint on the figurine. Based on the density of the fingerprint ridges compared to modern fingerprints left by people of a known gender, this may indicate that the item was created by a woman.
The figurine was discovered in a site that was used for burial, along with other unique deposits, including a child burial and a cache of human teeth, the researchers noted in the study.
Taken together, the features of the rare figurine suggest that the Natufians created complex imagery and potentially expressed animistic beliefs before “Neolithic Revolution“In Southwest Asia, as people settled permanently, they grew crops and domesticated animals.
In this way, the figurine of the woman and the goose “connects the world of mobile hunter-gatherers and the world of the first sedentary societies, showing how imagination and symbolic thinking began to shape human culture,” says the study’s co-author. Leor GrossmanThis is stated in a statement by an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
