12,000-year-old clay figurine from Israel shows male goose mounting a squatting woman, according to archaeologists
Long before the ancient Greeks imagined Zeus taking the form of a swan to mate with Princess Leda, the Natufians of Southwest Asia represented the same thing. Archaeologists recently discovered a 12,000-year-old carved piece of baked clay from a prehistoric settlement in Israel that they say represents an ancient belief system.
“When I took this little block of clay out of its box, I immediately recognized the human figure and then the 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 – thought to be a goose – and is the first known depiction of a woman in Southwest Asia, Davin and colleagues wrote in a study published Monday (Nov. 17) in the journal PNAS.
During one investigation, Davin painstakingly examined tens of thousands of small clay fragments collected from several Natufian archaeological sites. The Natufians were a sedentary hunter-gatherer culture present today in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago.
A tiny piece of worked clay from an archaeological site called Nahal Ein Gev II, located about 2 kilometers east of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, caught Davin’s eye.
“I understood that I was holding in my hands an exceptional piece, both for the subject represented and for the quality of the modeling created 12,000 years ago,” Davin said. “The human representation is the most complete and detailed representation of a human body identified thus far in Natufian culture.”
The “extremely rare” clay figurine may be the world’s first depiction of human-animal interaction, researchers detailed in the study.
The figurine was modeled from a single block of clay and found fragmented into three pieces, the researchers wrote in the study. It measures just 3.7 centimeters high and was heated in a fireplace before being coated with a red mineral pigment.
At the top of the figurine is a bird resting on the back of a human, its wings spread out and backward to partially envelop the person. An incised triangular area on the lower part of the figurine probably represents a female pubis, and symmetrical oval indentations near the face suggest breasts. The bird is likely a goose, the researchers wrote, because animal bones discovered at the site suggest that the Natufians used geese for both food and decoration.
One potential interpretation of the figurine is that it shows a hunter carrying a killed bird back to camp, according to the study. But because the woman is leaning forward and the goose appears alive, researchers favor a more mythological explanation: a male goose mates with the crouching female while riding her.
“Imaginary mating between human and animal spirits is known in many myths from historical periods around the world,” Davin said. “This emerging desire to represent feminine imagery may be linked to the growing importance of women in governing the spiritual practices of these communities.”
Davin also noticed a partial fingerprint on the figurine. Based on the density of the fingerprint ridges compared to modern fingerprints made by people of known gender, this may indicate that the piece was carved by a woman.
The figurine was discovered in an area of the site that had been used for burial, along with other unique deposits including a child’s burial and a cache of human teeth, the researchers noted in the study.
Taken together, the characteristics of the rare figurine suggest that the Natufians were creating complex images and potentially expressing animist beliefs before “Neolithic revolution” in Southwest Asia, when people settled permanently, cultivated crops and domesticated animals.
The woman and goose figurine therefore “bridges the world of mobile hunter-gatherers and that of the first sedentary communities, showing how imagination and symbolic thinking began to shape human culture,” co-author of the study. Léore Grosmanan archaeologist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a statement.
