{"id":389144,"date":"2025-11-19T04:49:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T04:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/389144\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T04:49:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T04:49:14","slug":"12000-year-old-artifact-depicts-a-goose-having-sex-with-a-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/389144\/","title":{"rendered":"12,000-Year-Old Artifact Depicts a Goose Having Sex With a Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ancient Greek mythology is full of bestiality, including Zeus turning into a swan to seduce Leda, and Poseidon cursing Pasipha\u00eb into falling in love with a bull. A new discovery in Israel, however, has revealed an artifact representing human-animal canoodling that dates back to thousands of years before the Odyssey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Archaeologists in northern Israel have uncovered a 12,000-year-old clay figurine of a woman with a goose on her back and identified it as the earliest known figurine of human-animal interactions, shedding light on the development of prehistoric artistic and spiritual expression.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis discovery is extraordinary on multiple levels,\u201d Laurent Davin, lead author of a paper<\/a> published yesterday in PNAS and archeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a university statement<\/a>. \u201cNot only is this the world\u2019s earliest figurine depicting human-animal interaction, but it\u2019s also the earliest naturalistic representation of a woman found in Southwest Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Natufian sex <\/p>\n

The figurine came to light in a semicircular stone structure with burials and ceremonial deposits in an approximately 12,000-year-old Late Natufian settlement. The Natufian<\/a> culture was a prehistoric Mesopotamian culture that thrived between around 11,000 and 9,000 BCE, for which geese held symbolic value as well as practical significance\u2014the animal was part of their diet.<\/p>\n

The figurine is 1.5 inches (3.7 centimeters) tall, was shaped from local clay, and was baked at around 400 degrees Celsius, indicating that the prehistoric community had control over early pyrotechnology. On it, Davin and his colleagues found traces of red pigment and a fingerprint likely belonging to a young adult or adult female artisan. The artifact represents a crouching woman with a goose on her back, with light and shadow lending the mini sculpture depth and perspective. While the figurine could be depicting a hunter carrying a hunted goose, the goose\u2019s position indicates that it is alive and carrying its weight.<\/p>\n

\"NatufianThe Natufian figurine next to its artistic reconstruction. \u00a9 Laurent Davin <\/p>\n

\u201cThe forward leaning position of the woman is also inconsistent with the transport of prey weighing less than 5 kg. Given that a wild living goose would not naturally adopt such a posture on a human\u2019s back, this representation seems to depict an imagined rather than an objective reality,\u201d the researchers wrote in the paper. \u201cInstead, the posture of the bird is an accurate naturalistic depiction of a gander (male goose) mating, by mounting the back of the squatting female,\u201d they continued.<\/p>\n

Spiritual and ritual importance <\/p>\n

The team theorizes that the scene represents an imagined or mythological dynamic that aligns with animist beliefs, which consider humans and animals to be spiritually connected. In fact, animal remains from the archaeological site indicate that villagers used goose feathers as decorations and turned some goose bones into ornaments, strengthening the creature\u2019s ritual significance.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, \u201cthe NEG II figurine captures a transformative moment,\u201d said Leore Grosman, co-author of the study and an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. \u201cIt bridges the world of mobile hunter gatherers and that of the first settled communities, showing how imagination and symbolic thinking began to shape human culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s to hoping Natufian myth had a less catastrophic ending than some of the ancient Greek human-animal couples, cough cough, the minotaur and Helen of Troy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ancient Greek mythology is full of bestiality, including Zeus turning into a swan to seduce Leda, and Poseidon…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":389145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2847,50,14942,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-389144","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-archaeology","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-prehistory","11":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}