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.
Link to pictures: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17O5vHUq6flnwqxNFzYejs0PqDB6JmBUz?usp=sharing
An international team of archaeologist led by Laurent Davin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Leore Grosman, 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, published this week in Science Advances, 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, millenia 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.
"This discovery completely changes how we understand the relationship between clay, symbolism, and the emergence of settled life," said Laurent Davin.
A Hidden Tradition Emerges
The ornaments were found at four Natufian sites: el-Wad, Nahal Oren, Hayonim, and Eynan-Mallaha, spanning more than three millennia of occupation. Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, the beads were carefully shaped from unbaked clay into cylinders, discs, and ellipses. Many were coated in red ochre, using a technique known as engobe, a thin layer of liquid clay smoothed onto the surface.
This is the earliest known use of this coloring technique anywhere in the world.
The sheer number and diversity of the beads reveal something unexpected: this was not an isolated experiment, but a sustained tradition. Clay, it turns out, had already become a medium for visual communication, long before it was used for bowls or jars.
Inspired by Plants and Daily Life
Nineteen distinct bead types were identified, many echoing the shapes of plants that were central to Natufian life: wild barley, einkorn wheat, lentils, and peas. These were the same plants 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, offering rare insight into organic materials that usually disappear from the archaeological record.
Together, the ornaments suggest that nature, especially the plant world, was not just a source of food, but a source of meaning.
Made by Children and Adults
Perhaps the most striking discovery lies not in the shapes of the beads, but in their surfaces.
Preserved fingerprints, 50 in total, allowed researchers to identify who made them. The prints belong to individuals of different ages: children, adolescents, and adults. It is the first time archaeologists have been able to directly identify the makers of Paleolithic ornaments, and the largest such fingerprint assemblage ever documented from this period.
Some objects appear to have been designed specifically for children, including a tiny clay ring just 10 millimeters wide.
The findings suggest that making ornaments was a shared, everyday activity, one that played a role in learning, imitation, and the transmission of social values from one generation to the next.
A Quiet Symbolic Revolution
For decades, archaeologists believed that symbolic uses of clay in Southwest Asia emerged only with farming and the Neolithic way of life. This study and the recent discovery of a clay figurine in Nahal Ein Gev II overturns that assumption.
Instead, it shows that a "symbolic revolution" began earlier, during the first stages of sedentarization, when communities were still hunting and gathering but beginning to live in permanent settlements. Clay ornaments became a way to express identity, affiliation, and social relationships, visually and publicly.
"These objects show that profound social and cognitive changes were already underway," said Prof. Leore Grosman. "The roots of the Neolithic lie deeper than we once thought."
By documenting one of the world's oldest traditions of clay adornment, the study reframes the Natufians not just as forerunners of agriculture, but as innovators of symbolic culture, people who used clay to say something about who they were, and who they were becoming.
