Long Before Pottery, Children Shaped Clay to Tell Stories

A cache of 142 beads and pendants from five Natufian sites (15,000 to 11,650 years before present) in Israel reveals that clay was not originally used for tools or cooking, but for symbolism and identity, often made by children whose fingerprints still mark the objects. The findings suggest that the roots of art, learning and social expression emerged long before agriculture.

A clay butterfly bead from the Late Natufian period at Eynan-Mallaha in the Upper Jordan Valley, colored red with ocher and marked with the fingerprints of the child (around 10 years old) who modeled it 12,000 years ago. Image credit: Laurent Davin.

“This discovery completely changes the way we understand the relationship between clay, symbolism and the emergence of sedentary life,” said Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The authors examined an assemblage of 142 beads and pendants from five Natufian sites spanning more than three millennia of occupation.

Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, the artifact was carefully shaped from unfired clay into cylinders, disks and ellipses.

Many were coated with red ocher, using a technique known as engobe, a thin layer of liquid clay applied to the surface.

This is the first known use of this coloring technique in the world.

The number and diversity of the beads reveal something unexpected: this was not an isolated experiment, but an enduring tradition.

It turns out that clay had already become a medium of visual communication, long before it was used to make bowls or jars.

Researchers have identified 19 distinct types of beads, many of which echo the plant forms that were central to Natufian life: wild barley, einkorn, lentils and peas.

These were the same plants that the Natufians harvested, processed and consumed intensively, plants that would later form the backbone of agriculture.

Traces of plant fibers preserved on some beads show how they were strung and worn, providing a rare glimpse into organic materials that typically disappear from the archaeological record.

Together, the ornaments suggest that nature, particularly the plant world, was not just a source of nourishment, but a source of meaning.

Perhaps the most striking discovery lies not in the shape of the beads, but in their surface.

The preserved fingerprints, 50 in total, allowed scientists to identify their author.

The prints belong to individuals of different ages: children, adolescents and adults.

This is the first time archaeologists have been able to directly identify makers of Paleolithic ornaments, and it is the largest fingerprint assemblage ever documented from this period.

Some objects appear to have been designed specifically for children, including a tiny clay ring just 10mm wide.

The results suggest that ornament making was a shared daily activity, which played a role in learning, imitation and transmission of social values ​​from one generation to the next.

For decades, archaeologists believed that the symbolic uses of clay in Southwest Asia only emerged with agriculture and the Neolithic way of life.

This study and the recent discovery of a clay figurine at Nahal Ein Gev II overturn this hypothesis.

Instead, it shows that a symbolic revolution began earlier, during the early stages of settlement, when communities still hunted and gathered but began living in permanent settlements.

Clay ornaments became a means of expressing identity, affiliation, and social relationships, visually and publicly.

“These objects show that profound social and cognitive changes were already underway,” said Professor Leore Grosman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“The roots of the Neolithic are deeper than previously thought. »

“By documenting one of the world’s oldest traditions of clay decoration, our study reframes the Natufians not only as precursors of agriculture, but also as innovators of symbolic culture, people who used clay to say something about who they were and who they were becoming.”

The results were published in the journal Scientific advances.

_____

Laurent Davin and others. 2026. Modeling identities among the first sedentary communities: emergence of personal clay ornaments in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia. Scientific advances 12 (12); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aea2158