Unveiling the Secrets Behind a Prehistoric Cult’s Death Ritual That Transformed Neolithic Art Forever
“One of the excavators suggested they were figurines, which the rest of the team were skeptical about,” said lead author Dr. Juan José Ibáñez. “However, the more we studied, the stronger the idea appeared.”
Published in the journal Antiquity, the research indicates these artifacts were used “during mortuary rituals and remembrance ceremonies that included the extraction, manipulation, and reburial of human remains.” Though the team was initially skeptical of the theory, firm evidence of this ritual just kept coming.
Kharaysin Archaeological TeamThe experts first believed these were tools, but the consistency of slim waists, broad shoulders, and wide hips connoted clear human representation.
Dating to 7500 B.C., these figurines were crafted only about a century after human depictions became more common in the Early Neolithic groups of Western Asia. While the objects alone don’t portend why the shift occurred, their discovery near ancient burial sites might hold the answers.
The experts explained that of the seven original burials there, many of the remains were found to have been dug up after an initial burial. After the dead partially decomposed, some of the bones appeared to have been removed in a yet unclear practice, before being reburied.
One of the deceased even had their skull removed, while another “individual was dug up from elsewhere and reburied in this funerary area, a process also repeated with several other pieces of skeleton,” the experts said in a statement.
The nearby placement of these figurines appeared to be random, though certainly deposited in close proximity for a reason. As such, it appears to the experts that this process of digging up the dead and creating figurines to deposit may have caused early humans to begin depicting humans in their art instead of mainly animals.
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