It’s always fun when archaeologists uncover a horny, mildly disturbing bit of ancient history. In today’s case, it’s a little bit of mythology found by researchers digging in northern Israel, who happened upon a little figurine of a human and a goose having sex.
More specifically, they found a 12,000-year-old clay figurine created by the Natufians, a Late Stone Age culture living in what’s now northern Israel. The piece depicts a crouching woman with a goose perched on her back as it is captured in the midst of giving her the business.
According to Laurent Davin, lead author of the new study in PNAS, this is the earliest known figurine showing a human-animal interaction and the oldest naturalistic depiction of a woman in Southwest Asia.
Found in a stone structure full of burials and ceremonial tchotchkes, the figurine seems to have been part of a ritual space where geese already played a major role in Natufian life. The Natufians ate them, decorated themselves with their feathers, and turned their bones into ornaments, among other uses. So, it tracks that they’d immortalize the bird in a moment that researchers believe wasn’t meant to represent anything that actually happened, but rather an imagined mythic scene honoring the deep connection they had with this particular creature.
Hopefully it’s that and not the other thing.
The figurine is about an inch and a half tall. It was sculpted from local clay and fired at roughly 400 degrees Celsius, showing early mastery of pyrotechnology. Traces of red pigment and what appears to be the fingerprint of a woman artisan are still hanging on to it after all these centuries. Researchers say the goose’s posture is pretty darn close to how a male goose mounts during mating, which is not something a goose would casually do to a human. That’s why they believe the figurine isn’t recording a real event but a tiny moment of mythic storytelling—kind of like a kid posing a Batman toy punching a Joker toy in the face.
Co-author Leore Grosman argues the figurine represents a cultural turning point, capturing the shift from nomadic hunter-gatherers to more settled communities, where imagination, ritual, and myth begin to take hold in human life, creating a long but straight shot to us watching Star Wars movies on Disney+ at home today.
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