Talk about ruffling feathers. A team in Israel has uncovered a petite clay figurine barely the size of a postage stamp that seems to immortalize a goose making an indecent proposal to a woman. Dug up from a long-lost settlement in the country’s north, the cheeky artifact could be the oldest known example of human-animal hanky-panky. Laurent Davin of Hebrew University explained to the Daily Mail that encounters between animal spirits and humans pop up often in animistic cultures usually in the realm of dreams, visions or myth. The archaeologists have even whipped up a fresh illustration to decode the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details and, well, it’s a lot. The tiny carving appears to show a nude woman, who doesn’t look too thrilled, bent forward as an oversized goose climbs aboard, its beak pressed gently to her head like some prehistoric lover’s whisper. The bizarre bauble, dug up with other clay scraps at the Nahal Ein Gev II site in northern Israel, features what researchers say are clearly carved breasts and a triangular pubic patch. Some optimists have floated a tamer theory maybe she was just hauling home a freshly killed bird but the goose looks anything but dead and is very much running the show. Tests indicate the figurine was shaped from local clay and fired around 400°C roughly 12, 000 years ago, proving that ancient artisans were, indeed, cooking up some wild scenes. Back then, the region was home to the Natufians the OG Middle Eastern trendsetters who ditched the roaming life, built the first real neighborhoods and basically invented staying put. And the Holy Land keeps serving up surprises this month. As The Post previously reported, archaeologists recently uncovered Canaanite ritual artifacts plus a 5, 000-year-old winepress near Tel Megiddo. The Israel Antiquities Authority announced on November 5, revealing the dig ran alongside the construction of Highway 66 in the Jezreel Valley. Tel Megiddo aka “Armageddon” from the Book of Revelation literally means “mountain of Megiddo” in Hebrew, and the digs unearthed treasures spanning Israel’s Early Bronze Age (around 3000 B. C.) to the Late Bronze Age (circa 1270 B. C.). The crown jewel? A rock-cut winepress, officials are calling the oldest ever found in the country. Ultimately, from myth-making to geese getting frisky, the ancient area just proved the past was weirder than we imagined.
https://nypost.com/2025/11/18/science/ancient-israeli-figurine-shows-goose-love-scene/