Plate Nº 87 · recorded November 12, 2026
Reported finding
Clay figurines from 15,000 years ago rewrite Middle East prehistory
Clay figurines from three Israeli sites, up to 15,000 years old, show hunter-gatherers made symbolic clay art millennia before farming or pottery existed in the region.
By Elena Vasquez3 min read599 words
In brief
- Clay figurines from three Israeli sites date to 15,000–11,500 years ago.
- The finds push symbolic clay use in the Middle East back millennia before the Neolithic agricultural revolution (~11,500 years ago).
- Some figurines depict birds, mammals and humans; one fragment shows orange-red pigment possibly matching a mountain gazelle's face.
- Researchers found evidence children helped make the figurines, suggesting cross-generational cultural transmission.
- The study by Laurent Davin et al. was published in PLOS One, DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0360388.
Clay figurines unearthed in Israel and dated to between roughly 15,000 and 11,500 years ago are the earliest known examples of a clay-figurine tradition in the Middle East. That's the headline finding of a study published in PLOS One by Laurent Davin of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleagues.
The date matters. Archaeologists have long believed clay figurines became common in the region only with the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic age, which began around 11,500 years ago. These artifacts push the symbolic use of clay back thousands of years earlier, into communities that never farmed at all.
What did the researchers find?
The figurines come from three sites in modern-day Israel. They were made by Natufian communities — a sedentary hunter-gatherer culture that occupied the region at the time, living in settlements while still hunting and gathering rather than farming.
Some of the figurines appear to represent birds, mammals and humans. Others are more fragmentary but still informative. One fragment carries traces of orange or red coloring, and its markings may have depicted the facial pattern of a mountain gazelle.
That pigment detail is small but telling. It suggests these weren't casual lumps of mud but decorated, deliberate objects — symbolic pieces meant to look like something.
The study appears in PLOS One under the title "Modelling symbols among the first-sedentary communities: Emergence of clay figurines in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia" (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360388).
Why does this challenge old assumptions?
Archaeologists have found Natufian figurines before. But most were carved from bone or stone, which reinforced the idea that clay as an artistic medium arrived late, alongside farming villages and, later, pottery.
The new finds break that pattern. Clay, it turns out, was already a symbolic material among hunter-gatherers. In the authors' reading, the Natufian figurine world was more varied and complex than previously recognized — and the cultural roots of the Neolithic may run deeper than the agricultural revolution itself.
The paper suggests the seeds of the region's Neolithic culture were sown well before farming began. In plain terms: the villages came first in spirit, then in grain.
What do the figurines say about the people who made them?
Davin points to something beyond the objects themselves. The evidence, he said, indicates children took part in making them.
"These discoveries change how we understand the beginnings of artistic expression in the first villages of humanity," Davin said. "Thousands of years before agriculture and pottery emerged, people were already using clay to create figures, as part of their beliefs and knowledge of the natural world."
He added: "What is particularly fascinating is the evidence that children were involved in making these objects, suggesting that creativity and cultural knowledge were shared across generations."
That detail implies art-making wasn't a specialized adult craft. It was a community activity, passed down within families and settlements.
How solid are the conclusions?
The study is based on artifacts from three sites, and some identifications remain tentative — the gazelle reading, for instance, rests on one colored fragment that "may have" shown the animal's facial pattern. Dating spans a long window, 15,000 to 11,500 years ago, covering the tail end of the Epipaleolithic period.
Still, the core claim is straightforward: shaped, decorated clay figures predate farming in the Middle East by millennia. Future excavations will show whether Israel's Natufian sites were unusual or part of a wider, still-undiscovered tradition.
The takeaway: humans were making symbolic art from clay thousands of years before they planted their first crops.
via phys.org/rss-feed/ (Source)
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Correspondent covering money, funding and market shifts around general science news at SciBeat.
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