Seven thousand years ago, in the Ubaid period of southern Mesopotamia, artists made small terracotta figures with human bodies and long, slant-eyed heads that modern museum catalogs describe as lizardlike or reptilian. Found at sites including Ur and Tell al-Ubaid, and echoed by related discoveries across the Mesopotamian-Gulf world, these figures predate the best-known Sumerian city-states and appear before readable writing can explain them. Some show female anatomy, painted ornaments, dark bitumen hair, hands on hips, and one of the most provocative forms: an adult carrying or nursing a child with the same strange head.

Ancient-astronaut proponents argue that the Ubaid figurines may preserve memories of nonhuman beings, divine visitors, or a reptilian-looking population remembered before later Mesopotamian mythology took written form. They cite the large almond-shaped eyes, elongated skulls, narrow faces, and mother-and-child imagery as evidence that the artists were not merely inventing monsters.

The strongest conventional explanations point to ritual masks, artistic stylization, divine or ancestral imagery, serpent symbolism, fertility and protection, or possibly culturally valued head forms. Yet no surviving Ubaid text names the figures, and no biological evidence identifies a nonhuman species. The central question remains: were these sacred symbols, masked humans, remembered ancestors, or something the first settled communities of Mesopotamia believed had once lived among them?

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YES OR NO: Do you believe the Ubaid figurines preserve evidence of ancient nonhuman contact???????