8800-6500 BC if you were wondering
So how do we think it was made if it's pre pottery? Pure stone carving for this kind of detail seems very impressive
Every time I see artifacts like these I can’t help but think whether we are producing artifacts that will be discovered 10000 years into the future, and still be in a robust state.
I'm going to print this for my kid's orthodontist's office. Funny bloke, always wears crazy socks and refers to himself as a "fencing contractor".
At once familiar and also utterly alien. Perhaps part of a ritual to honor the dead, or perhaps worn to scare children into eating their vegetables. We'll never know.
Reminds me of a hockey goalie mask...
Israeli archeology is a joke Talk about vested interests.
This might not actually be the oldest mask. There are 16 known Neolithic masks in the world and only two have secure archaeological context (the stuff found in the same strata as the mask that we can actually radiocarbon date, like bones or wood). Most of them were found long ago and sold to collections without archaeologists excavating them, losing a lot of the scientific value. AFAIK more than ten of them are still in private collections.
This mask is not one of the two, as it was discovered by a Palestinian farmer and without a controlled excavation all that context was lost (although they’ve done surveys of the discovery site and found evidence of similarly aged artifacts). It was dated with patina analysis, which is a bit controversial to say the least. Which is to say, the scientific consensus about its age is fragile.