Lumpy flint figurines may be some of the earliest depictions of real people – Livescience.com

Archaeologists at an ancient burial site in Jordan thought one of their team might have sunstroke when he suggested some rough flints he’d found could represent people. But now his discovery could change how scientists think about the Neolithic Near East.
More than 100 of the unusual flint artifacts dating back to about 7500 B.C. have been discovered at Kharaysin, an archaeological site a few miles northeast of Amman in Jordan. 
The archaeologists who found them now think the artifacts may be early depictions of real people and may have been used for ancestor worship. They also think the figurines could shed light on why portrayals of humans became widespread in the Near East from about 1,000 years earlier. However, experts contacted by Live Science were not entirely convinced that the lumpy stone artifacts were used in ancestor worship rituals, though they don’t think it’s out of the question.
Related: Photos: 5,000-year-old Neolithic figurine
After one of the team digging at Kharaysin unearthed several of the flint artifacts, each about 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, he proposed they showed rough human figures — with a projecting head flanked by two notches on each side that could represent the tops of shoulders and hips.
His idea was first met with skeptical smiles, said archaeologist Juan Ibáñez of Barcelona’s Milà y Fontanals Institution of the Spanish National Research Council.
“The team reacted with jokes about how much sun he had received on his head,” Ibáñez said.
But as the team found more of the strangely shaped flints, they started to take the idea seriously.
“We acknowledged that they were something consistent and previously unknown,” Ibáñez told Live Science in an email.
Strange figurines
Statistical analysis of the flints show they have the same “violin” shape as Neolithic human sculptures from the same region, such as this statue from ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan. (Image credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0)
In a paper published July 6 in the journal Antiquity
, Ibáñez and his team describe how they came to see the flints as individual portrayals of specific people, despite their rough appearance.
Research shows the distinctive “violin” shape of the strange artifacts is similar to the shapes of Neolithic Near East sculptures that unmistakably portray people.
The team statistically compared the dimensions of the Kharaysin flints to those of human sculptures unearthed at ‘Ain Ghazal, a Neolithic archaeological site a few miles away, and found they had a similar violin shape.
“The more skeptical archaeologists in our team had to accept that, most probably, they were

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