12,000 year-old Woman: The First Jewish Mother?

When I read about the discovery of the bones of a 12,000 year-old woman near the Sea of Galilee, clutching a leopard pelvis, sporting the plume of a Golden Eagle, and with a collection of 50 tortoise shells, I wondered: Is this the first Jewish Mother?
Or was she the first woman tycoon? Clearly she had a lot of loot. And a leopard doesn't give up its pelvis cheaply. Undoubtedly, she was a woman of substance. I imagined her as a Paleolithic Leona Helmsley, the real estate billionaire dubbed the “Queen of Mean” by her maid.  Perhaps she had cornered the cave market in the upper Galilee, just when nomads were turning sedentary. And did she really need to be buried with 50 tortoise shells, not to mention a human foot?
What was going on here?  I called up Leore Grosman at the Hebrew University who, along with Natalie Munro, was one of the archeologists who found the woman's gravesite, in a cliff above a wadi. She disabused me of this fantasy that the skeleton might have belonged to the prototype Jewish Mother. “Of course not," Grosman replies huffily. “This was 6,000 years before Abraham and the start of Judaism.” But, she adds, “Humans have been living in the region continuously ever since.”  So, it's possible to imagine that some of her genes were eventually passed down to the Israelite tribes.
It turns out this 12,000 year-old skeleton belonged to a she-shaman, a witch doctor, who would intercede for her tribe in the spirit world. She also seemed to have a kink in her spine, which could have caused her to drag her foot. She limped.
This reminded me of something I heard as a kid from my dad, a geologist who explored the Amazon. He'd come home with wonderful stories: a tribe that shrunk the head of a Baptist missionary (his ginger hair and beard had novelty value in those lost backwaters of the Amazon), a giant boa that snatched a man out of a dugout canoe, and the shaman who convinced his tribesmen that at night he could transform himself into a black panther.
“Why did the villagers believe this?” I asked, ever the boy skeptic.
“Because,” my father replied, “both the panther and the shaman had a limp.”
Once, years later, visiting nomads in Afghanistan, I was shown an Afghan woman shaman, and she too was deformed. The men took turns carrying her around in their arms; it was an honor. She was frail, had long fingers studded with talismanic rings and bright, shining eyes. She was radiant. The Afghans trusted her connection with nature; she divined where to find water and a blade or two of grass in the desert.
I mentioned this coincidence of the three shaman's deformities to Archeologist Grosman and she didn't seem surprised. “You often have cases where shamans have undergone a severe mental or physical trauma, which make them more receptive to the spirit world,” she explained. And that, she said, might have been the case with the she-shaman of the Galilee. With her damaged spine, the shaman couldn't have moved much. But in the company of her animal spirits, she roamed far and free.

by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem