The world’s famous idol Shigir is twice as old as Stonehenge! [New Study]

The incredible Shigir Idol, a wooden wonder from the prehistoric world, was dated about 11,600 years ago in 2018. Now, a new study pushed that date back another 900 years. This means that the oldest known wooden statue in the world is more than twice as old as Stonehenge!

Identifying the amazing era of the idol Shigir

The new study is published in Quaternary international and proves that, given the age of 12,500 years, the haunting humanoid statue is also more than twice as old as the pyramids of Giza – a status made even more amazing by the fact that it is made of wood. The main author of the work, Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the Department of Cultural Heritage in Lower Saxony, Germany, proposed a motive behind the creation of the statue. New York Times :

“The idol was sculpted during an era of great climate change, when early forests spread in a later warmer glacier to post-glacial Eurasia. The landscape has changed, and art – figurative models and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock – has also become perhaps a way to help people cope with the challenging environments they have encountered. ”

Illustration of the idol Shigir.

Illustration of the idol Shigir. ( Public domain )

Many faces of the idol Shigir

Standing taller than a two-story building – it is 2.8 meters (9.2 feet) long, although it was originally 5.3 meters (17.4 feet) before the lengths of the artifact were accidentally destroyed during the era. Soviet – it is believed that the idol was a large tree more than a century old, which was modeled and decorated with a stone spoon.

The body of the prehistoric sculpture is flat and rectangular, and the horizontal lines intersect approximately at the level of the chest, appearing to represent ribs. Ancient artists gave the idol seven faces at different levels of the statue, suggesting to academics that the positions probably referred to a hierarchy. Three figures are placed one on top of the other on both the front and the back, and a seventh figure connects both sides, completing the composition.

An early reconstruction of the Shigir idol from 1894. (Sverdlovsk Regional Museum)

Researchers believe that the idol’s tall cheekbones and right nose may reflect what the creators looked like at the time.

Does the statue contain an encrypted message?

The incredible wooden sculpture was drawn from a peat bog on the western edge of Siberia, Russia, 125 years ago. As if in a time capsule, the idol stood excellently preserved about four meters (13.5 feet) below the ground, protected from the antibacterial properties of peat, which prevented it from decomposing.

Shigir Idol - the oldest wooden sculpture in the world, dating back 11,000 years.

Shigir Idol – the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world. ( CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The sculpture was found in numerous fragments, but when it was divided together, it was discovered that the surface was covered with Mesolithic symbols and geometric designs, including chevrons, straight lines, herringbone hatching, crushing lines and more. If these are an intentional message of primitive writing, they would make the Idol Shigir the world’s oldest code on the planet.

These mysterious markings have not yet been deciphered, but many suspect they may carry encrypted information. If translated, we can gather information about the Mesolithic man’s understanding of the natural and spiritual world.

Does Shigir idol contain coded messages?

Does Shigir idol contain coded messages? “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: “This is a masterpiece, which carries a gigantic emotional value and strength. It is a unique sculpture, there is nothing else in the world like this … The ornament is only covered with encrypted information. People transmitted knowledge through the Idol. ”

The messages remain “a total mystery to modern man,” but Zhilin says prehistoric craftsmen 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 academics, who had defended the idol’s age in front of skeptics in the scientific community. Said Natalia Vetrova, director general of the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of History Siberian Times in 2018 that 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 tell the world how old our idol is. ”

A look at the lost world of prehistoric woodworking

Terberger also says, “This is extremely important information for the international scientific community. It is important for understanding the development of Eurasian civilization and art and of humanity as a whole. ”

With its complex iconography, the Shigir Idol also presents archaeologists with new perspectives on hunter-gatherer societies in Europe and Asia at the time of its creation and on prehistoric woodworking. This shows that the work of art of the time was more diverse than the images with animals and hunting scenes that are usually associated with that period.

Despite the fact that Paleolithic artists living in forested areas had a large amount of wood at their disposal, much of their artwork was probably lost because wooden creations had deteriorated over the centuries, unless they were kept in ideal conditions such as the peat bog that saved the Shigir Idol. As scientists claim in their paper, “Woodworking was probably widespread during the Late Glacier until the early Holocene. We see the Shigir sculpture as a document of a complex symbolic behavior and of the spiritual world from the Urals hunters of the Late Glacial to the early Mesolithic. ”

The head of the Shigir Idol, the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world. (Sverdlovsk Regional Museum)

Subsequent excavations of numerous unexplored peatlands in the Urals may reveal several examples of prehistoric wooden works of art. However, Artnet notes that “the lack of funding means that there are currently no excavations underway” in this area.

Top image: Shigir idol. Source: Terberger et al., Quat. Int., 2021

By Liz Leafloor

Updated March 25, 2021.

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