Largest prehistoric bead cache, found in northern Israel, is a window into early artisans |
A group of Israeli and international researchers uncovered the largest collection of prehistoric clay beads ever documented worldwide among the items excavated at several sites in northern Israel, a new study published in Science Advances on Wednesday has revealed.
They identified over 1,000 human-made artifacts, including the 142 beads presented in the paper, at sites that date back 12,000 to 15,000 years. The robust sample size has allowed the research team to form unprecedented hypotheses about prehistoric life in the Natufian culture.
“Before this study, we only knew of four beads made of clay from this period anywhere in the world,” Laurent Davin from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the lead author of the study, told The Times of Israel over the phone.
For the study, Davin and fellow researchers reviewed and analyzed dozens of thousands of what Davin described as “clay lumps” excavated at el-Wad, Nahal Oren, Hayonim, and Eynan-Mallaha over the decades and stored by the various organizations that carried out the digs (Hebrew University, University of Haifa, and Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem).
“The idea behind the study was to look into the beginnings of the symbolic use of clay, which was previously thought to be related to the emergence of an agricultural lifestyle around 11,000 years ago,” Davin said. “We believed it might have started earlier, in the very first villages of humanity, the Natufian culture.”
The Natufians lived in the Levant at the very end of the Paleolithic period (approximately 15,000 to 11,700 years ago) and are considered a critical link between the last Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and the first Neolithic farmers. They were the first to live in sedentary settlements but still maintained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, without growing their own food.
All the sites whose artifacts were checked in the study are........