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Billed as " the oldest masks in the worldly concern , " a creepy-crawly aggregation of 9,000 - yr - older stone faces is now on display in Israel .
With stilted grin and with child eyehole , the artifacts are think to have represented the spirit of dead ancestor and may have been worn during Stone Age ceremonial and rituals , researchers say .
Researchers think these masks could have been worn comfortably on the face during ancient rituals. This mask comes from the site of Horvat Duma in the Judean Hills.
Before putting the rare artifacts inside crank cases at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem , the curators say they brought the masks together for a relative study . Three - dimensional moulding showed that most of the masks could have been placed well on the face , curator Debby Hershman said . [ See Pictures of the Stone Age Masks ]
" The oculus holes give up for a wide field of vision , and the comfortable assignation of the spate is suit to human facial contours , " Hershman tell Live Science in an electronic mail .
There are also holes on the edge of some of theancient masks , which may have been used to attach them to the nerve . Alternatively , these perforation might have been string with hair to make the masks look more human or with cords to suspend the masks from pillar or other social organization .
Holes at the edges of the stone artifact may have been threaded with hair or strung with cords to attach the mask to the face or hang it up on a building.
The masks come from various site in the Judean Desert and the Judean hills , according to the museum . The artefact go out back to theNeolithic epoch , when world started generate up nomadic life style in party favour of lasting settlements , complete with farms and tame animals .
Two of the stone masks were already in the museum ’s collection ; one come from the Nahal Hemar cave in a cliff tight to theDead Seaand the second had been found at the nearby archaeological site of Horvat Duma .
The other artifact are on loan from the private compendium of Judy and Michael Steinhardt of New York . None of those object have a known provenance , but base on analyses of the material , researchers think most of the mask came from the Judean hill or Judean foothill .
The exhibition , " front to Face : The Oldest Masks in the World , " will be on view through Sept. 13 .
