Modelling symbols among the first-sedentary communities: Emergence of clay figurines in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia

The emergence of clay technologies and their use in symbolic practices marks a momentous techno-symbolic innovation for human societies. While in North Africa, Europe and East Asia, this innovation was sporadically attested during the Upper Palaeolithic, in Southwest Asia, it has been commonly believed to emerge in full much later, as one of the innovations associated with Neolithic agricultural societies. Here, shifting back the ‘revolution of symbols’, we report evidence of the earliest clay figurative tradition in Southwest Asia with the discovery of 154 figurative artefacts from three Natufian (15,000–11,650 years cal. BP) sites in the Southern Levant (Israel). Through a combined multidisciplinary approach, we demonstrate that children and adults manufactured these objects to produce new symbols with new figurative techniques and practices used as their primary media of figurative expression. Our study provides important original insights regarding the demographics of craft production and the development of symbolic practices at the beginning of sedentism that influenced the Neolithic transition in Southwest Asia.