Ancient Greek mythology is full of bestiality, including Zeus turning into a swan to woo Leda and Poseidon cursing Pasiphae to fall in love with a bull. However, a new discovery in Israel has revealed an artifact representing human-animal canoodling that dates back thousands of years. odyssey,
Archaeologists in northern Israel have discovered a 12,000-year-old clay figurine of a woman with a swan on her back and identified it as the oldest known figurine of human-animal interactions, shedding light on the evolution of prehistoric artistic and spiritual expression.
“This discovery is extraordinary on many levels,” archaeologist Laurent Davin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lead author of a paper published yesterday in PNAS, said in a university statement. “Not only is it the world’s oldest sculpture depicting human-animal interaction, it is also the earliest naturalistic representation of a woman found in southwest Asia.”
Natufian sex
The figurine came to light in a semicircular stone structure with burials and ceremonial deposits in an approximately 12,000-year-old Late Natufian settlement. The Natufian culture was a prehistoric Mesopotamian culture that flourished between about 11,000 and 9,000 BC, for which geese had symbolic value as well as practical importance – the animal was part of their diet.
The figurine is 1.5 inches (3.7 cm) tall, was shaped from local clay, and was fired at approximately 400 °C, indicating that the prehistoric community had control over early pyrotechnic technology. On it, DeWine and his colleagues found traces of red paint and a fingerprint that possibly belonged to a young adult or adult female artisan. This artwork depicts a crouching woman with a swan on her back, with light and shadow giving depth and perspective to the miniature sculpture. While the sculpture may depict a hunter carrying a hunted swan, the position of the swan indicates that it is alive and carrying its own weight.
“The female’s forward-leaning position is also inconsistent with the transport of prey weighing less than 5 kilograms. Given that a wild live swan would not naturally adopt such a posture on a human’s back, this representation appears to depict a fantasy rather than an objective reality,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “Instead, the bird’s posture is an accurate natural depiction of the mating of a gander (male swan), which climbs on the back of a seated female and mates,” he continued.
spiritual and religious importance
The team believes this scene represents a fantasy or mythological dynamic that aligns with animist beliefs, which view humans and animals as spiritually connected. In fact, animal remains from the archaeological site show that villagers used swan feathers as decoration and turned some swan bones into jewellery, reinforcing the ritual importance of the creature.
Furthermore, “the NEG II figurine captures a transformative moment,” said study co-author Lior Grossman, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It connects the worlds of mobile hunter-gatherers and the first settled communities, showing how imagination and symbolic thinking began to shape human culture.”
Here’s hoping that the ending of the Natufian myth was less devastating than that of the ancient Greek human-animal pairings, cough cough, the Minotaur, and Helen of Troy.