B. A. Rybakov, investigating the development paths of the ancient rhombo-meander ornament in the Neolithic, concludes that: “The stability of this complex and difficult-to-implement pattern, its undoubted connection with the ritual sphere makes us treat it especially carefully… Neoenolithic meander and rhombic the pattern turned out to be a middle link between the Paleolithic, where it first appeared, and modern ethnography, which gives innumerable examples of such a pattern in fabrics, embroidery and weaving”. Speaking about the dentin pattern of mammoth tusks, as a possible prototype of the Paleolithic meander-carpet pattern of the Mezin type, B. A. Rybakov notes that: “The amazing durability of exactly the same pattern in the Neolithic, when there were no mammoths anymore, does not allow us to consider this a mere chance coincidence, but forces us to look for intermediary links. I consider the custom of ritual tattooing to be such a mediating link”.

Ornament of Neolithic settlements of Ukraine

Comparing the Paleolithic bone objects decorated with this ornament with the Neolithic “seals”, he concludes that such stamps were made to tattoo a woman’s body during ritual acts, and that it is the custom of tattooing that is the connecting link that fills the Mesolithic gap between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. But along with the preservation of the ancient ornament in the form of mandatory ritual coloring in the Mesolithic, it can also be assumed that in the Neolithic period the seals were no longer used for tattooing or not only for it, but at some stage they began to apply carpet-meander patterns on fabrics made of plant fibers, which probably already existed in the Neolithic life, as evidenced by the finds of spinning wheels.

With the development of weaving techniques, the ancient craftswomen of the Neolithic or Eneolithic were able to transfer complex ornaments from rhombuses and meanders directly into the structure of the fabric. Such an ancient carpet-type ornament, almost identical to the Mezin and Early Neolithic, can be easily found on linen canvases that existed in North Russian villages at the beginning of the 20th century. Made in a multi-thread technique, they are all completely covered with a rhombo-meander pattern, obtained with a complex interweaving of warp and weft threads. As a rule, towels, tablecloths, skirts were made of such canvas, to which strips of spacers were sewn, recruited with red threads along a white field. The ornament of these spacers is often very similar to the ancient rhombo-meander, but while the texture of the white canvas repeats the ancient compositions with practically no changes, on the spacers we see, as it were, fragments of an archaic scheme, its parts divided and grouped according to some new principles.

North Russian weaving

Weaving Central Russia

Ukrainian weaving

Weaving Hindustan

It must be said that the possibility of such variability was laid in the Mezinian ornaments. Despite the outward similarity, the ornaments of items from the Mezin site have a number of differences. So on the bracelet there is a carpet-meander pattern, but on the figurines from the mammoth tusk the pattern is already somewhat different: it is a meander spiral placed among zigzags, parallel meander stripes and a meander, depicted in motion from right to left and left to right, in which the outlines are already quite clearly read one of the most widespread signs during the Eneolithic and copper-bronze on the territory of Eastern Europe – the swastika (Table 4).