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When we examine the carved jade artifacts of the Olmec civilization (c. 1500–400 BCE), we confront a paradox that has long troubled art historians. The Olmec clearly possessed the technical mastery to render human forms with striking naturalism, as evidenced by certain portrait heads and figurines that display individualized facial features and anatomically precise musculature. Yet the majority of Olmec jade carvings deliberately fuse human and jaguar characteristics—snarling mouths, cleft skulls, fanged grimaces—in ways that systematically distort the very naturalism the artists demonstrably commanded. Earlier scholars attributed this hybridity to a lack of representational sophistication, but such explanations falter against the evidence of the Olmec artists' selective realism. The intentionality of the distortion suggests that the were-jaguar motif served not as a failure of mimesis but as a conscious repudiation of it, signaling that the spiritual truths the carvings were meant to embody required a visual language that transcended mere depiction of the visible world.