4,500-year-old baby rattles discovered in Syria — made from clay. See the toys
It was small but held a pottery production center and a temple, and may have acted as a destination for pilgrims. It was also a place where regular people, the non-elites, lived out their lives thousands of years ago.
Nine decades after the site was first excavated, new analysis of pottery pieces found in the city show ancient parents wanted the same thing parents seek today — some peace and quiet.
A total of 19 pottery pieces were found from the Early Bronze Age in the city of Hama, and were made in the material and style of the local skilled potters, according to a May 19 news release from the National Museum of Denmark.
The pieces were handles that would then have been attached to orb-like structures, researchers said, making a kind of maraca-like item.
The orbs likely 'contained little pieces of clay or small pebbles, which enabled the production of sound,' but 'the noise they make is so low' researchers eliminated the 'possibility that they might have been used as musical instruments,' according to the release.
Instead, they were likely used as baby rattles.
'The rattle fragments are decorated with painted bands of mainly dark buff/reddish/black color; either thick bands, smaller single or double horizontal bands, or diagonal/spiral painted lines,' according to a study on the finds published April 30 in the peer-reviewed journal Childhood in the Past. 'In some cases, the end of the handle is decorated with a painted circular or a cross motif.'
The rattles weren't found in rooms, researchers said, but rather in the fill layer between building levels. They were often found together in a single area.
The earliest rattle dates to 2450 B.C., while the youngest came from another level dated to between 2300 and 2000 B.C., making all the rattles more than 4,000 years old, according to the study.
The clay mixture, a calcareous clay with other essential minerals, is the same as what was used by the skilled potters in the workshop, researchers said. This means the rattles were likely part of their regular production, and may have been sold on the market along with cups and bowls.
'It shows us that parents in the past loved their children and invested in their wellbeing and their sensorimotor development, just as we do today,' Mette Marie Hald, a study author and researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, said in the release. 'Perhaps parents also needed to distract their children now and then so that they could have a bit of peace and quiet to themselves. Today, we use screens, back then it was rattles.'
The handles themselves are small, fit to a child's hand, again suggesting they were used as a toy as opposed to an instrument or something utilitarian, researchers said.
'When you find items such as these, the tendency in archaeology has been to interpret them as musical instruments or even cultic objects when, really, they are something much more down-to-earth and relatable such as toys for children,' Hald said.
One of the oldest known baby rattles was found in an infant burial in northern Mesopotamia, dating to the Ubaid period between 5300 and 5000 B.C., according to the study.
The rattles became widespread in the third millennium B.C., researchers said, sometimes made of clay while other times made from gourds or other material.
Toys became more widespread as there started to be professionalized industries, even in places like Hama, and men and women started to both hold a form of a job outside the home, according to the study.
'I hope that this will provide us with a greater insight into the world of children in the past. From an economic point of view, it is fascinating that already 4500 years ago, there was an actual market for commercial toys,' Hald said. 'At the same time, it is touching to get a glimpse of a family's everyday life — perhaps a parent stopped at a market stand on their way home and bought a rattle as a present for their child. This scenario is entirely recognizable to us today.'
Hama is in western Syria, roughly a 60-mile drive east from the Mediterranean Sea.
The research team includes Hald, Georges Mouamar, Stephen Lumsden and Agnese Vacca.
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"We clearly have a very strong bias [toward Europe] in the data distribution," Monika Korte, a geophysicist and magnetic modeler at Germany's GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, told Live Science. "Where we have sparse data we have just a very blurred picture, a very rough idea of what's going on." Geographic diversity is important, as samples taken from one area can indicate the magnetic field only in that area. For instance, other data similar to the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly's intense spikes of magnetic strength have been spotted in places like China and Korea around the Iron Age as well, but there's not enough evidence to confirm these as bona fide anomalies or to say whether they are related to the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly, Korte said. Why should we learn more about historic anomalies? The discovery of the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly redefined our previous understanding of the potential strength of the field, Shaar said. Understanding how much the magnetic field can change may seem like a purely abstract endeavor, but these ancient fluctuations may have implications for modern times. Another important anomaly is the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), a region of weakened magnetic field that spans central South America in a strip that ends near southern Africa. It likely first emerged 11 million years ago, caused by the slight difference in location of the magnetic axis and the rotational axis at Earth's core. As the magnetic field is slightly off-center to the rotational axis, the field dips in strength over the South Atlantic, though the field's interaction with the churning mantle may also contribute to the anomaly. The South Atlantic Anomaly still exists today, and has disrupted communications from satellites and the International Space Station, as the weak magnetic field in the region lets through more radiation from solar wind. Studying the SAA throughout its history has helped scientists understand how our magnetic field changes over time, and how such anomalies alter the likelihood of a magnetic field reversal, when Earth's north and south poles flip. But although scientists have a reasonable understanding of the South Atlantic Anomaly, its weakened magnetic field is very different from the strong spikes of the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly, which has baffled geophysicists. And though researchers haven't pinpointed the exact extent of the anomaly, its seemingly small scale of around 1,000 miles (1,609 km) across, combined with the extremely high spikes in the magnetic field, isn't easily explained. Some geomagnetists had suggested that the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly developed due to a narrow flux patch that developed on the outer core under the equator before it drifted north towards the Levant, potentially contributing to other spikes of intensity recorded in China. The inverse of the large lobes that funnel the magnetic field into the planet at the North Pole, this 'positive' flux patch would have pushed the field out in a powerful burst. Others believed the single flux patch didn't travel, instead multiple grew under the Levant, erupted, and decayed in place. Still, no theories can explain why the flux patch developed in the first place. With the most up-to-date archaeomagnetic data, geomagnetist Pablo Rivera at the Complutense University of Madrid published a paper in January that simulated both the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly and the South Atlantic Anomaly. By modeling their movement over time, his work suggested that both anomalies may have been influenced by a superplume underneath Africa — a massive blob of hot rock on the barrier between the core and the mantle that may disrupt the flow of the geodynamo below it. However, much is still unknown. "So far, there is not a single simulation that really describes all the [magnetic] features that we see well," Korte told Live Science. Many archaeomagnetic data points from around the globe suggest there may be more intensity spikes that could help resolve the mystery and create a unifying theory to explain the SAA, the LIAA and other spikes. But there currently isn't enough data to describe them accurately, or even begin to understand their causes. "We don't really understand what causes these anomalies, but we hope to learn more about how the geodynamo operates and what kinds of changes we also can expect for the future magnetic field," Korte said. This certainty is needed now more than ever, as more of our communications take to the skies. More than 13,500 satellites currently orbit Earth — a dramatic increase from only around 3,000 in 2020. The Government Accountability Agency estimates that another 54,000 satellites will launch by 2030. These satellites monitor weather patterns, send phone and TV signals, and create GPS. Satellites are generally protected from space radiation by Earth's magnetic field. But in places where the field is weaker, such as above the South Atlantic Anomaly, satellites have more memory problems as radiation bombards onboard computers and corrupts data. Filling out the picture Despite the expense and technical challenges of archaeomagnetism, there are many initiatives to expand the amount of data. In the U.S., the Institute for Rock Magnetism is expanding its archaeomagnetism program to begin building a more thorough history of the magnetic field in the Midwest, hoping to build their own localized dating system using archaeomagnetism, similar to the record Shaar and his collaborators have built in the Levant. RELATED STORIES —Weird dent in Earth's magnetic field is messing with auroras in the Southern Hemisphere —Earth's magnetic field formed before the planet's core, study suggests —Why do magnets have north and south poles? Interest in archaeomagnetism is also growing around the globe. The first archaeomagnetism data from Cambodia was published in 2021, and the first regional model of the magnetic field of Africa for the recent past was published in 2022. As the field of archaeomagnetism grows, scientists can start building a better understanding of how features like superplumes affect the magnetic field. The past 50 or so years of data has captured "only a really tiny snapshot in time," Shaar said, and "maybe there are more [anomalies] to find." Solve the daily Crossword
