Children and adults shaped clay 15,000 years ago, long before pottery or farming, archaeologists find

Amazing stuff!

"Long before pottery, before agriculture, when the first villages took shape, people in the Levant were already molding clay with their hands, carefully, deliberately, and sometimes playfully. Some of those hands belonged to children. ...

An international team of archaeologists ... has uncovered the earliest known clay ornaments in Southwest Asia, revealing a forgotten chapter in the story of how humans began to express identity, belonging, and meaning through material culture. The findings ... push back the symbolic use of clay in the region by thousands of years.

The ornaments, 142 beads and pendants, were made some 15,000 years ago by Natufian hunter-gatherers living in what is now Israel. These communities were the first in the world to settle permanently in one place, millennia before the rise of agriculture. Until now, clay in this period was thought to play little or no ornamental role. In fact, only five clay beads from this era were previously known worldwide. ..."

From the abstract:

"Ornamental practices are essential for understanding socioeconomic structures and technosymbolic dynamics of prehistoric societies. However, our perception of these practices remains limited and biased, due to preservation issues, e.g., perishable materials, which are known only through indirect evidence or rare conservation contexts. Such is the use of unbaked clay for ornamentation, a practice that became widespread across Eurasia in the Neolithic, sporadically documented earlier in Upper Paleolithic Europe.

Focusing on the Levantine “revolution of symbols,” we report the earliest known clay ornamental tradition outside of Europe: 142 personal ornaments from five Natufian (Late Epipaleolithic, 15,000 to 11,650 calibrated years before the present) sites in Israel. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we show that both children and adults participated in crafting these items, which reflect newly emerging symbolic expressions, some inspired by plant forms. These findings offer original insights into the social organization of craft production and the rise of symbolic practices at the dawn of sedentism, which ultimately shaped the Neolithic transition in Southwest Asia."

Children shaped clay 15,000 years ago, long before pottery or farming, archaeologists find

Modeling identities among the first-sedentary communities: Emergence of clay personal ornaments in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia (open access)

Fig. 1. Typological variability of Natufian personal ornaments in the Southern Levant.

Fig. 2. Map of the distribution of Natufian sites.