The man who has been thinking for seven thousand years

He sits on a low stool with four legs. His elbows rest on his knees, and his hands hold his head on either side of his face. He is fired clay, dark grey, with a polished surface. His almost oval head has a modelled nose, eyes made of triangular impressions, and a mouth marked by a small hole. A very long neck carries the head. The posture reads as thought — hence the nickname, borrowed from the famous sculpture by Rodin.

She sits straight on the ground, with no chair: one leg stretched forward, the other bent at the knee, her hands on her leg. Her body is modelled with broad hips, her head small, its features barely sketched. Both figurines stand the same height: 11.5 cm. Each fits in a palm.

The name “Thinker” is modern. Rodin conceived his Thinker in 1880, as part of The Gates of Hell; the first monumental bronze was cast in 1904. His stands about 185 cm tall at the Musée Rodin in Paris. The Hamangia one is sixteen times smaller and some seven thousand years older.

In the Neolithic, male figurines were a small minority among the very large corpus of figures found in necropolises and homes. That the Thinker stands beside a female figurine is a rarity, and the rarity points to a direct bond between the two. Both were laid in one grave, beside the buried body, as if to accompany the dead beyond it.

The Cernavodă necropolis where they were found holds more than 400 inhumation graves. Grave goods there include stone axes, pots, bracelets, and human figurines. Of every figurine found so far, the Thinker’s posture sets him apart: a small, roughly shaped figurine in a similar pose is recorded at Trușești, in the Cucuteni area.

His gesture has been read as meditation, and it may equally be mourning. Archaeologists link the thinking pose to reflection on life and death, fitting for a grave. Other readings see a vegetation god, dying to rise again each spring, or a god of death. None can be proven: the Hamangia people left no texts.

Nor is he the only thinker of prehistory. A Neolithic “thinker” was found at Karditsa in Greece, and a Middle Bronze Age one, some four thousand years old, at Yehud in Israel. The pose of a person with their head in their hands seems to have been discovered several times, in different places.

The Hamangia culture is a Late Neolithic archaeological culture of Dobruja — between the Danube and the Black Sea — and of southern Muntenia. It began around 5250–5200 BC and lasted until around 4550–4500 BC. The name comes from the eponymous settlement of Baia-Hamangia, by Lake Golovița.

Cultural links with Anatolia suggest the Hamangia people were recent settlers from there, unlike the neighbouring cultures, which descend from older Neolithic settlement. They brought black polished pottery and long-necked figurines. They buried their dead in necropolises, crouched or stretched out, with gifts of flint, worked shells, and bone tools. Later the culture was absorbed by the expanding Boian culture, as it shifted toward the Gumelnița culture.

Cernavodă is one of the notable places of this world, through the necropolis that held the Thinker and the Sitting Woman. Other known settlements are Durankulak on its lake, and Baia, the site that gave the culture its name.

The two figurines were found in 1956, among the grave goods of the Hamangia necropolis at Cernavodă. Today they stand at the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest, inventory numbers 15906 and 15907.

They have travelled far for objects 11.5 cm tall. From November 2009 to April 2010 they were in New York, in “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000–3500 BC”. In 2019 they reached Liège, at the Grand Curtius, during Europalia Romania, the festival with Romania as guest country.

Since 1 December 2006 the Thinker has also stood on the back of the 200-lei banknote, beside a watermill. The front carries the portrait of Lucian Blaga. Seven thousand years from the Cernavodă clay to the wallet.