AI-generated editorial illustration by PW. Imagined clay-working scene, not archaeological evidence.
Someone pressed a finger into a small clay figure. Then a child left another print across it. Roughly 15,000 years later, the two impressions still overlap on the figure’s back.
The head is gone, and the little body is damaged. But those marks preserve something unusually personal: the order in which two people touched the same wet clay. Researchers think they may be looking at a trace of an adult handing a figurine to a child during its making.
The object comes from Eynan-Mallaha in the Upper Jordan Valley, in present-day Israel. It appears in a study published November 11 in PLOS One by Laurent Davin and colleagues, who examined clay from three Natufian settlements dating to about 15,000–11,650 years ago.
The smaller hand came second
The team compared the spacing of the fingerprint ridges with a modern reference collection. The first impression fits the study’s category covering young adults of either sex and adult women. A second, crosswise impression partly covers it and fits a child who had not reached puberty.
That makes a teaching moment a compelling possibility, not a witnessed fact. The prints don’t reveal whether the two people were related, what they said, or why they were making the figure. The researchers also call their fingerprint analysis preliminary: age and sex estimates have limits, and clay can shrink as it dries or heats.
A collection hiding in the clay
This wasn’t a row of pristine statues waiting to be lifted out of the ground. The team sorted roughly 40 kilograms of clay and sediment lumps collected during earlier excavations at Eynan-Mallaha, Hayonim Terrace and el-Wad Terrace. Some of the material had never been studied in this way.
They identified 15 figurines and 139 small cylinders interpreted as probable fragments of bodies or appendages. So the headline total of 154 doesn’t mean 154 complete little people. Nearly everything is broken.
The surviving forms nevertheless show considerable variety: human bodies, birdlike heads and mammals. Children’s prints also appear on objects with traces of shaping and coloring, suggesting they were participating in the work rather than merely picking up finished pieces.
One fragment interpreted as a gazelle’s head carries red coloring. Small holes suggest that perishable materials may once have supplied its horns. The horns haven’t survived; their proposed positions are marked in the comparison below.
Before farming, people were already making figures
The Natufians were hunter-gatherers developing settled communities. In Southwest Asia, a flourishing clay-figure tradition has often been tied to the later spread of farming. These finds move a substantial part of that story earlier. They aren’t the world’s oldest clay art: older examples are known elsewhere.
Exactly what the figures meant remains open. They may have carried stories, beliefs or lessons that no longer survive. What does survive is less grand but remarkably close: a small object passed between different-sized hands, with one person’s touch still crossing another’s.
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