The incredible idol Shigir, a wooden marvel of the prehistoric world, was dated to about 11,600 years ago in 2018. Now, a new study has pushed that date back some 900 years back. This means that the world’s oldest known wooden statue is more than twice as old as Stonehenge.
Identify the amazing age of the Shigir idol
The new study is published in International Quaternary and shows that given the 12,500-year-old, the haunting humanoid statue is also more than double the pyramids of Giza, a state even more astonishing for being made of wood. The main author of the document, Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist from the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, Germany, proposed the reason for the creation of the statue. New York News :
“The idol was sculpted during a time of great climate change, when the first forests stretched over a warmer late glacier in postglacial Eurasia. The landscape changed and art (figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved into the rock) was also possible, perhaps, as a way to help people control the challenging environments they encountered. ”
Illustration of the idol Shigir. ( Public domain )
The many faces of the idol Shigir
Taller than a two-story building, 2.8 meters long, although it was originally 5.3 meters before the lengths of the artifact were accidentally destroyed during the Soviet era, the idol is believed to have been a large tree over a century old that was shaped and decorated with a stone spoon instrument.
The body of the prehistoric sculpture is flat and rectangular, and the horizontal lines cross approximately at chest level, resembling ribs. Ancient artists gave the idol seven faces at different levels of the statue, suggesting to scholars that the positions were probably related to a hierarchy. Three figures are placed on top of each other, both front and back, and a seventh figure connects the two sides, completing the composition.
An early reconstruction of the Shigir idol of 1894. (Sverdlovsk Regional Museum)
Researchers believe the idol’s tall cheekbones and straight nose may reflect the appearance of the creators at the time.
Does the statue contain an encrypted message?
The incredible wooden sculpture was extracted from a peat bog on the western outskirts of Siberia, Russia, 125 years ago. As if in a time capsule, the idol remained excellently preserved about four meters (13.5 feet) underground, protected by the antibacterial properties of the peat, which prevented it from decomposing.
Shigir Idol: the oldest wooden sculpture in the world. ( CC BY-SA 3.0 )
The sculpture was found in numerous fragments, but when it was joined, it was discovered that the surface was covered with Mesolithic symbols and geometric designs, including cookies, straight lines, herringbone hatching, splattered lines and much month. If it is an intentional message of primitive writing, it would turn the idol Shigir into the oldest code in the world.
These mysterious marks have not yet been deciphered, but many suspect they may carry encrypted information. If translated, we can gain information about understanding the natural and spiritual world of Mesolithic man.
Does Shigir Idol contain encrypted messages? The “faces” appear throughout the sculpture. ( YouTube screenshot )
Professor Mikhail Zhilin, of the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that this could be the case, saying: “It is a masterpiece that has an emotional value and is quite gigantic. It is a unique sculpture, there is nothing else in the world like this … The ornament is only covered with encrypted information. People passed on knowledge with the help of the idol. ”
The messages remain “an absolute mystery to modern man,” but Zhilin says prehistoric artisans must have “lived in total harmony with the world, had advanced intellectual development, and a complicated spiritual world.”
The new research is a victory for Russian scholars, who had been defending the idol age in the face of some skeptics in the scientific community. Said Natalia Vetrova, general director of the Sverdlovsk Museum of Regional History The Siberian Times in 2018, previous claims of the antiquity of the idol Shigir “were not recognized by the international scientific community. And we wanted to know for sure and explain to the world how old our idol is ”.
A vision of the lost world of prehistoric wood
Terberger also says that “This is an extremely important fact for the international scientific community. It is important to understand the development of Eurasian civilization and art and of humanity in general. ”
With its complex iconography, the idol Shigir also presents archaeologists with new perspectives on hunter-gatherer societies in Europe and Asia at the time of its creation and on prehistoric wood. It reveals that the works of art of the time were more diverse than the images of animals and hunting scenes that are usually associated with this period.
Despite the fact that Paleolithic artists living in wooded regions would have had a wide supply of wood within reach, it is likely that much of their artwork was lost because the wooden creations would have deteriorated in the over the centuries, unless they have been preserved in ideal conditions. like the bog that saved the idol Shigir. As the scientists argue in their article, “woodworking probably extended during the late glacial to the beginning of the Holocene. We see the sculpture of Shigir as a document of a complex symbolic behavior and of the spiritual world of the hunter-gatherer of the Urals of the late Glacial and the primitive Mesolithic ”.
Head of the idol Shigir, the oldest wooden sculpture in the world. (Sverdlovsk Regional Museum)
Other excavations of the many unexplored peat bogs of the Urals may reveal more examples of prehistoric wooden works of art. Still, Artnet notes that “the lack of funding means there are currently no excavations underway” in this area.
Top image: The Shigir Idol. Source: Terberger et al., Quat. Int., 2021
By Liz Leafloor
Updated March 25, 2021.