Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have found a 2,200-year-old gold bear figurine in an Early Iron Age burial mound that looters had hit but failed to empty completely, Live Science reported. The sculpted bear stands on its hind limbs and holds a pot-like container between its front paws. Holes at its base indicate that it could have been sewn onto a headdress, according to a translated statement from the Kazakhstan government. The figurine was unearthed at the Karagaily burial ground in the southern city of Almaty, along with an unusually large number of human bones for a single mound.
"The sculpted bear figurine is unique to Kazakhstan. No similar finds have been discovered previously," Lyazzat Sagyndykova, director of the Almaty Museums Association, which conducted the excavation, said in the statement. "This discovery allows us to trace cultural parallels across the whole of Eurasia, from the Black Sea region to Altai." The figurine dates to the Saka period, named for a nomadic horseback-riding people from Iran who lived on the Eurasian Steppe and in the Tarim Basin of what is now western China. Comparable gold objects have been found in the region, including a headdress element shaped like a small leopard at the Almaty Kok-Kainar burial ground, from the fourth century B.C., and a gold, sheep-shaped decoration on the headdress of Kazakhstan's famous "Golden Man," a young Iron Age warrior buried in a lavish grave.
It is unclear which bear species the figurine depicts. Today Kazakhstan is home to two subspecies of brown bear: the Tien Shan or Himalayan brown bear in the southeast, and the East Siberian brown bear in the Altai Mountains in the east. Preliminary analyses date the recently excavated mound to the fourth to third centuries B.C. The mound is about 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall and roughly 85 feet (26 meters) wide. Based on the number of bones, experts suspect it may have held four adults and three children.
"Of particular interest is the unusually large number of human remains in a single burial mound, as such burials are atypical for Kazakhstan," Marat Mugalovich Nurpeisov, a senior research fellow at the Almaty Museums Association, said in the statement. "As a rule, burial mounds of a comparable size were intended for the burial of one or two people." Archaeologists also found pieces of Saka pottery, most of it scattered after the burial was looted in ancient times. The thieves left a 10-foot (3-meter) looting pit. Further work, including anthropological analysis, is planned to determine the exact number of people buried there. After the investigations are finished, some of the artifacts will go on display at the Almaty Museum, the statement said. The verified find is a unique gold headdress ornament and an unusually crowded mound, still under study.