Long before the ancient Greeks imagined Zeus taking the form of a swan to mate with the princess Leda, the Natufian people in southwest Asia were depicting the same thing. Archaeologists recently discovered a 12,000-year-old sculpted piece of fired clay from a prehistoric settlement in Israel that they say represents an early belief system.
"When I took this small block of clay out of its box, I immediately recognized the human figure and then the bird lying on its back," Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science in an email.
