GoodScience

🔴 Recovered from the Judean Desert, this limestone mask is one of the oldest human faces ever carved. At around 9,000 years old, it was made in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, thousands of years before the first written word, so no texts explain its meaning.

Its stark, hollow-eyed stare gives almost nothing away. Was it worn in ritual, hung on a wall, or made to represent an ancestor? Today it is preserved at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, a silent face from a world before history, still watching.

Then it meant ritual. Now it means origin.