Discovered in present-day Israel, the beads suggest that Natufian groups used clay for symbolic purposes many years earlier than scholars previously thought, according to a new study This 12,000-year-old butterfly clay bead was decorated with red ochre and marked with the fingerprints of a child. Laurent Davin Archaeologists in Israel have analyzed a trove of clay beads and pendants sculpted by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago. According to a recent study published in the journal Science Advances , these artifacts suggest that humans in this region were using clay symbolically thousands of years earlier than scholars thought. “This discovery completely changes how we understand the relationship between clay, symbolism and the emergence of settled life,” says lead author Laurent Davin , an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a statement .…