The wood used to carve the Shigir Idol is around 12,250 years old.
The debate has major implications for the study of prehistory, which tends to emphasize a Western-centric view of human development. It’s also twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids, which date to roughly 4,500 years ago.Īs the Times reports, researchers have been puzzling over the age of the Shigir sculpture for decades. “The landscape changed, and the art-figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock-did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”Īccording to Sarah Cascone of Artnet News, the new findings indicate that the rare artwork predates Stonehenge, which was created around 5,000 years ago, by more than 7,000 years.
“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” Terberger tells Franz Lidz of the New York Times. Its ancient creators carved the work from a single larch tree with 159 growth rings, the authors write in the study. As Thomas Terberger, a scholar of prehistory at Göttingen University in Germany, and his colleagues wrote in the journal Quaternary Internationalin January, new research suggests the sculpture is 900 years older than previously thought.īased on extensive analysis, Terberger’s team now estimates that the object was likely crafted about 12,500 years ago, at the end of the Last Ice Age. More than a century after its discovery, archaeologists continue to uncover surprises about this astonishing artifact. The unique object-a nine-foot-tall totem pole composed of ten wooden fragments carved with expressive faces, eyes and limbs and decorated with geometric patterns-represents the oldest known surviving work of wooden ritual art in the world. Gold prospectors first discovered the so-called Shigir Idol at the bottom of a peat bog in Russia’s Ural mountain range in 1890.
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