THE ANCIENT SHIGIR IDOL DISCOVERED IN RUSSIA

Discovered in Russia in 1890, the Shigir Idol is one of the oldest known wooden sculptures, dating to approximately 12,000 years ago. It was found in a peat bog, which had preserved it.

The sculpture is 2.8 metres high, but its original height is thought to have been 5 metres or more. It was carved from a larch tree (approximately 159 years old at the time) using the jaw of a beaver and stone tools. On it are faces, hands, and zigzag lines. No one knows what it was used for, but some say it could have been a territorial or navigational marker, or perhaps it depicts forest spirits or had some ritual purpose. Some have suggested that it depicts a creation myth.

The sculpture might have been placed upright next to an ancient lake before it fell into the bog, thus preserving it for over 12,000 years.

According to Thomas Terberger, a scholar of prehistory at Göttingen University in Germany:

“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia. 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.”

This sculpture was carved about ten thousand years before the city of London was founded and is over twice the age of Stonehenge. A truly ancient artifact.

It is currently on display in the

Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore in Russia.

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Picture Credits: Siberian Times