The Berekhat Ram Figurine: A Late Acheulian Carving from the Middle East

A small figurine found at Berekhat Ram on the Goland Heights in the early 1980s suggest that modern humans living during the Middle Paleolithic in what is now the Middle East recognized natural forms and shapes suggesting categorical forms. The pebble excavated dates back to the Late Acheulian and was found to have been intentionally modified to give it human features, such as a head and neck. © COPYRIGHT 1997 Antiquity Publications, Ltd. The human capacity for recognizing categorical forms and their defining characteristics extends to a recognition of natural forms and shapes that may suggest these categories. The issue is raised below by the analysis of an archaic figure from the Levant in which a natural form was apparently intentionally modified to produce an enhanced human image. Early symbolling capacity There is analytical evidence for imagery apparently made by modern humans in the Levant during the Middle Palaeolithic at c. 54,000 b.p., 15-20,000 years before modern humans began manufacturing imagery in Europe (Marshack 1996a). There are reports of a bone flute from Sloevina (Turk et al. 1995), of manufacture of beads by Neanderthals during the Chatelperronian at Arcy-sur-Cure, and the recent suggestion of evidence for an apparent Neanderthal visit, carrying fire, to the cave of Bruniquel, France, to build a stone ’structure ’ that contained a burnt bear bone, at c. 46,000 b.p. (cf. Balter 1996; Berkowitz 1996). There is the recent report of an anatomically modern human presence, including the presence of rock art and ochre, in northwestern Australia at c. 75,000[greater than]100,000 BP (Fullagar et al. 1996).(1) Suggestions for early symbolling or image-making in different parts of the world have increased in recent year