Over 13,000 Years Ago, Children Left Fingerprints On Clay Figurines

Overlapping Fingerprints May Show a Child Learning to Shape Clay

A child, probably under 10, pressed a fingertip into wet clay more than 13,000 years ago, and the print survives on a tiny bird figurine. The figurine spent years hidden among baked clay lumps from three sites in Israel, presumed to be leftovers from making red pigment. A closer look at roughly 40 kilograms (about 88 pounds) of that material, partly under a microscope, turned up 154 objects: 15 recognizable figurines of birds, animals, and people, plus 139 cylinder-shaped fragments that likely broke off similar figures.

Natufians, hunter-gatherers who lived roughly 15,000 to 11,650 years ago, made these objects. Among the first people in Southwest Asia to settle in one place rather than roam for food, they left fingerprints that point to children at work. On one figurine, a child’s print partly covers an older person’s, hinting at a possible hands-on teaching moment from deep prehistory.

Experts had long believed clay figures of people and animals became common in this region only after farming villages appeared. A new study in PLOS ONE argues for a different order of events. Settled hunter-gatherers, not early farmers, started the region’s clay figurine tradition, and children helped carry it out.

Ancient Clay Figurines Turned Up in Lumps Once Presumed to Be Pigment Waste

A team led by Laurent Davin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reexamined collections from el-Wad Terrace on Mount Carmel, Hayonim Terrace in the Galilee, and Eynan-Mallaha in the Upper Jordan Valley. Sorting tens of thousands of pieces, most smaller than a sugar cube, the researchers hunted for signs of human hands, such as fingertip dents, palm prints, and carved or smoothed surfaces. None of the objects they present are accidental clay clumps, the paper states.

Eleven of the 15 figurines appear to be birds, two appear to be hoofed animals, and two are human forms: a torso with arms and a face with an oversized nose. One animal head may depict a gazelle, with two small holes behind the ears where twig horns may once have been inserted. Ten of the 11 birds carried traces of red coloring, which suggests they were originally painted. Most figurines are broken, often just a head, and only two objects in the whole collection, a bird figurine and one cylinder, were found complete. The complete bird measures over half an inch.

Several birds have downturned heads and vertically curved necks. The authors suggest this imitates a courtship display of male ducks, an interpretation rather than a proven fact.

Fingerprints on the Clay Figurines Point to Children Helping Shape Them

Fingerprints carry an age clue. A child’s fingertip ridges are narrower and packed closer together than an adult’s, so measuring ridge width gives a rough age estimate. The team measured prints on two figurines and five cylinder fragments, plus prints from clay ornaments and scraps found at the same sites, and compared them with prints from 118 modern people in the Czech Republic, ages 1 to 77.

Makers ranged from young children to adults, but the mix varied by site. At el-Wad Terrace, adult male prints appeared and children’s were less common. At Hayonim Terrace and Eynan-Mallaha, no adult male prints turned up, and the prints belonged to children, pre-teens, and younger adults or adult women. The method cannot tell young adult men from adult women, so the sex of those makers stays open.

One figurine from Eynan-Mallaha carries a print from a young adult or an adult woman, partly covered by a print from a child before puberty. Children were “not simply curious onlookers,” the authors write, since their prints show up in the shaping and even the coloring of objects. The overlapping prints may reflect hands-on teaching, though prints alone cannot show whether the two people were related or whether anyone was instructing.

Figurine Placement at Eynan-Mallaha Shifted Toward Specialized Buildings

Eynan-Mallaha, the site with the most objects, shows how clay handling changed over time. In its earliest phase, figurines and cylinders lay together in a single dwelling called Shelter 131, with no obvious separation by type. A duck-like bird figurine turned up in the ash of that home’s central fireplace, beside roughly 500 burned mallard bones, some with cut marks that suggest feather removal. The authors weigh whether the figurine was lost or burned on purpose in a ritual, and say heating tests could help decide.

By the final phase, figurines were missing from the dwellings and concentrated in specialized buildings, mostly one linked to cooking. Cylinder fragments kept turning up in homes. The authors call the shift drastic.

Settled Hunter-Gatherers Built a Clay Figurine Tradition Before Farming

Three sites alone yielded more clay figures and fragments than all those known from the earliest farming-era villages across the Levant, according to the paper, which puts a dent in the old timeline. Craft details suggest a practiced tradition: red clay coatings, incised feather lines on one bird, and similar bird heads repeated at Eynan-Mallaha across thousands of years.

Clay figures in this region were not a farming invention. Long before farming villages, children were already leaving their marks in the clay.

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