A Mysterious Boulder Carved to Look Like a Tortoise Shell May Offer Evidence of the Middle East’s Earliest Ritual Ceremonies

In the deepest, darkest reaches of a cave in northern Israel lies a boulder carved to resemble a tortoise shell. Its deep grooves were gouged some 35,000 years ago, and now, researchers say the artifact may be the oldest known evidence of ritual practices in the Levant, a region on the eastern Mediterranean that borders the sea between Greece and Egypt.

Construction workers discovered Manot Cave in the mountainous area of Galilee in 2008. Researchers have been excavating the site since 2010; three years later, Israel Hershkovitz, an anthropologist at Tel Aviv University, ventured into Manot Cave’s deepest chamber, eight stories below the entrance.

“I was looking for human remains in the back of the cave, and suddenly I saw it,” Hershkovitz tells Haaretz’s Ariel David. “It was just sitting there on the surface next to the cave’s wall, but it’s so dark there that it’s no wonder we didn’t see it before.”

The carved boulder dates to the Early Upper Paleolithic era, which took place between roughly 46,000 and 31,000 B.C.E. As the researchers write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Manot Cave was a pivotal “ritual compound” during this period. The team thinks ancient people gathered inside the cave to perform communal rituals centered around the engraved boulder.

Over a decade of excavation, Hershkovitz and his colleagues have pieced together a long history of human occupation in Manot Cave. Per a statement from Case Western University, whose dental students identified prehistoric bones at the site, both Neanderthals and humans lived in the cave at different times. In 2015, a 55,000-year-old skull found in Manot provided physical evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. Ancient activity mostly took place near the cave’s entrance, the study says: There, researchers have found evidence of flint knapping, animal butchering and food consumption.

“We were concentrating close to the entrance, where there was more light and people were living,” Hershkovitz tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. “It was so dark and deep [in the cave’s rear that] we rarely visited that part.”

The rock, which weighs about 60 pounds and measures less than a foot across, “may have represented a totem or a mythological or spiritual figure,” says Omry Barzilai, head of archaeological research at the Israel Antiquities Authority, in a statement from Tel Aviv University. “Its special location, far from the daily activities near the cave entrance, suggests that it was an object of worship.”

The boulder’s chamber has “enhanced natural acoustics,” the statement notes, “which could have created a unique auditory experience for communal activities such as prayer, singing and dancing.” Researchers found wood ash on nearby stalagmites, suggesting that prehistoric humans carried lit torches to navigate the deep hall.

“It is no surprise that prehistoric hunters chose to conduct their rituals in the darkest part of Manot Cave, as darkness embodies sacred and hidden qualities, symbolizing rebirth and renewal,” says Hershkovitz in the Tel Aviv statement.

Ofer Marder, an archaeologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, tells Haaretz that the scientists had a gut feeling upon first glance that the boulder’s adornment wasn’t naturally occurring—but they had to prove this theory. An examination of the engravings under a laser microscope found grooves that looked like they were made by flint tools. Per the study, the researchers then made replicas of flint tools found nearby and successfully used them to engrave another Manot Cave boulder.

The researchers don’t know the meaning of the carved boulder’s engravings, which resemble the pattern of a tortoise shell. As Hershkovitz tells Live Science, the carved, scute-like sections might stand for distinctive communities that united to form an early society in the area.

“Establishing ritual centers during the Upper Paleolithic was a central element in the development and institutionalization of collective identity,” Hershkovitz says in the Tel Aviv statement. Rituals were “a necessary stage in the transition from small, isolated hunter-gatherer groups based on blood ties between individuals to large, complex societies.”

Editors’ note, December 19, 2024: This story has been updated to clarify that the carved boulder may be the earliest evidence of ritual ceremonies in the Middle East more broadly.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.