Amid thousands of small clay fragments excavated at the 12,000-year-old village site of Nahal Ein Gev II in northern Israel, around a mile east of the Sea of Galilee, one stood out to archaeologist Laurent Davin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The object was just 1.5 inches tall, but he could see that it had been expertly molded to depict a crouching woman with a bird perched on her back. “When I first looked at this lump of clay, I recognized that there was an anthropomorphic form with something on its back, but it looked blurry,” says Davin. “Then I illuminated it at a particular angle, and I saw all the details.” As Davin and his colleagues have learned more about the tiny figurine, they’ve concluded that it embodies a complexity of narrative and symbolic expression once thought to have only been developed significantly later.
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