Hebrew University team finds the oldest clay ornaments in Southwest Asia

Archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported in March 2026 that Natufian hunter-gatherers living in what is now northern Israel crafted beads and pendants from clay around 15,000 years ago, the earliest known clay ornaments in Southwest Asia. The study, published in Science Advances and announced on 19 March, was led by postdoctoral researcher Laurent Davin of the university's Institute of Archaeology, working with Professor Leore Grosman.

The team analysed 142 clay beads and pendants recovered from four Natufian sites, el-Wad, Nahal Oren, Hayonim and Eynan-Mallaha, which together span more than three thousand years of occupation. Before this work, only five clay beads from the period were known anywhere in the world, and researchers generally assumed that clay played little or no decorative role at the time. Many of the newly described pieces were coated in red ochre using engobe, a thin wash of liquid clay, which the university describes as the earliest known use of that technique.

The objects also preserve about 50 fingerprints left by the people who shaped them, including children, teenagers and adults. One butterfly-shaped bead, coloured red, carries the prints of a child of around ten, a rare direct trace of an individual from the distant past and a hint that young people took part in making ornaments.

The Natufians lived just before the transition to farming in the Levant, and many were among the first people to build permanent villages. The researchers argue that the new evidence shows important social and symbolic changes were already under way among them, before agriculture took hold. Haaretz noted that figurative art and clay working appeared in the Levant much later than in Europe, where the earliest known use of clay, by the Pavlovian culture in today's Czech Republic, dates back about 37,000 years.