Stone Age · c. 13,000–10,000 BC · Hayonim, el-Wad, Nahal Oren and Eynan-Mallaha, Northern Israel
15,000-year-old clay beads with children's fingerprints found at Natufian sites in Israel
The 142 unfired beads and pendants predate pottery and farming, and 50 fingerprints show that children, adolescents and adults all made them.
Peer-reviewed paper
Hayonim, el-Wad, Nahal Oren and Eynan-Mallaha, Northern Israel Natufian hunter-gatherers in what is now Israel were making beads and pendants from clay around 15,000 years ago, according to a study of 142 ornaments from four sites. That is thousands of years before pottery or farming. Fifty fingerprints preserved on the objects belonged to children, adolescents and adults. It is the first time the makers of ornaments from this period have been identified directly.
Laurent Davin led the study, which was published in Science Advances. Davin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and worked under Professor Leore Grosman. The team describes the collection as the oldest assemblage of clay ornaments in Southwest Asia.
Before this work, only five clay beads from the Palaeolithic had been recorded anywhere in the world. Researchers had generally assumed that clay played almost no part in making ornaments at that time.
The Natufians lived in the Levant at the end of the last Ice Age. They still hunted and gathered for their food. But they were among the first people to settle in permanent villages.
The ornaments come from four of their settlements: el-Wad, Nahal Oren, Hayonim and Eynan-Mallaha in the Upper Jordan Valley. Together the finds span more than three millennia of continuous occupation. They date from about 15,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago, roughly 13,000 to 10,000 BC.
Bead shapes resemble wild food plants
The objects are small and were modelled in unfired clay as cylinders, discs and ellipses. The researchers identified 19 distinct types. Many of the shapes resemble plants that the Natufians gathered, processed and ate in large quantities.
These plants include wild barley, einkorn wheat, lentils and peas. Centuries later these species became the founding crops of Neolithic agriculture in the region.
Some beads were coated with a slip, a thin liquid clay slurry. The makers coloured it with red ochre. The team says this is the earliest known use of the technique anywhere.
Traces of plant fibre survive on some pieces. They show how the beads were strung and worn. Such perishable materials rarely survive in the archaeological record.
One find is a small clay ring barely ten millimetres across. Its size suggests to the researchers that it was made for a child to wear.
Another is a butterfly-shaped bead from the Final Natufian at Eynan-Mallaha, coloured red with ochre. It carries the fingerprints of a child of about ten. The child modelled it some 12,000 years ago.
Fingerprints show makers of all ages
The 50 fingerprints are the largest set known from this period. They come from people of different ages. The team therefore argues that making these objects was a shared, everyday activity and not one restricted to specialists.
The team also argues that the work may have played a part in learning and imitation. It may also have helped pass social values from one generation to the next.
The researchers see the ornaments as a way of showing identity, group membership and social ties. They point to the long period of production, the number of bead types and the work invested in coating them with slip. In their view, these are signs that clay was already a medium for visual communication. That was long before anyone used it to make containers.
This discovery completely changes how we understand the relationship between clay, symbolism, and the emergence of settled life.
Laurent Davin, postdoctoral researcher, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
For decades archaeologists assumed that symbolic uses of clay began with the Neolithic and its farming economies. The occasional figurine was the exception. The authors argue that the beads, together with a recently published clay figurine from the site of Nahal Ein Gev II, place the start of that process earlier. In their view it began in the first phases of settled life among hunter-gatherers.
Grosman said the objects show that deep social and cognitive changes were already under way. According to Grosman, the roots of the Neolithic reach further back in time than had been thought.
Sources
- The earliest clay beads of Humanity, found in Natufian sites from 15,000 years ago, bear 50 fingerprints of children, adolescents, and adults (La Brújula Verde)
- Clay Beads from Southwest Asia Dated to 15,000 Years Ago (Archaeology Magazine)
Paper: Laurent Davin et al., Modeling identities among the first-sedentary communities: Emergence of clay personal ornaments in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia. Science Advances 12, eaea2158 (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea2158
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