The Shigir Idol: Oldest Ritual Art? (Russia)

[ramonmercado]

I think this fits here.

A team of researchers in Germany has found evidence suggesting that the famous wooden Shirgir Idol is actually 11,500 years old. The team has documented their efforts and findings in a paper published on the Cambridge University Press site Antiquity.

The Shigir Idol was discovered in an ancient peat bog by miners in Russia back in 1890. Early analysis showed that it was made entirely of larch wood and was constructed from several chunks. It remained preserved for thousands of years because of antimicrobial properties found in the peat. The idol was also covered extensively with markings, some of which depicted tiny human faces. To this day, no one knows what most of the markings depict. It was also noted that some of the original pieces of the idol had been lost—it is believed that it originally stood approximately five meters tall. In 1997, a team in Russia used radiocarbon dating to estimate the age of the icon and found it to be approximately 9,500 years old.

Experts have studied the carvings on the idol over the years, and many have suggested they likely represent a form of art, possibly linked with spiritual or religious activities.

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-wooden-shigir-idol-egyptian-pyramids.html

 

[Jim]

It's quite interesting that in last decade(s) the timeline for human proto-civilizations appears to be moving back in time. The above mention structure(s), Göbekli Tepe and perhaps the sphinx being examples of this. By Jov just when they they thought they had it down.

 

[ramonmercado]

It's quite interesting that in last decade(s) the timeline for human proto-civilizations appears to be moving back in time. The above mention structure(s), Göbekli Tepe and perhaps the sphinx being examples of this. By Jov just when they they thought they had it down.

Many things have moved back, even deliberate sea travel. There may have been Neanderthal seafarers.

 

[EnolaGaia]

This new and extensive article from The New York Times provides an update on the Shigir Idol and its significance in understanding the possible age and range of Stone Age artwork, as well as the way it suggests the prevailing focus on the Near East / Fertile Crescent region as the birthplace of such human endeavors may be an error.

How the World’s Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Reshaping Prehistory

At 12,500 years old, the Shigir Idol is by far the earliest known work of ritual art. Only decay has kept others from being found. ...
By Franz Lidz
March 22, 2021

The world’s oldest known wooden sculpture — a nine-foot-tall totem pole thousands of years old — looms over a hushed chamber of an obscure Russian museum in the Ural Mountains, not far from the Siberian border. As mysterious as the huge stone figures of Easter Island, the Shigir Idol, as it is called, is a landscape of uneasy spirits that baffles the modern onlooker. ...

In archaeology, portable prehistoric sculpture is called “mobiliary art.” With the miraculous exception of the Shigir Idol, no Stone Age wood carvings survive. The statue’s age was a matter of conjecture until 1997, when it was carbon-dated by Russian scientists to about 9,500 years old, an age that struck most scholars as fanciful. ...

In 2014, Dr. Terberger and a team of German and Russian scientists tested samples from the idol’s core — uncontaminated by previous efforts to conserve the wood — using accelerator mass spectrometry. The more advanced technology yielded a remarkably early origin: roughly 11,600 years ago, a time when Eurasia was still transitioning out of the last ice age. The statue was more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, as well as, by many millenniums, the first known work of ritual art. ...

A new study ... further skews our understanding of prehistory by pushing back the original date of the Shigir Idol by another 900 years, placing it in the context of the early art in Eurasia. ...

{This ...} latest paper challenges the ethnocentric notion that pretty much everything, including symbolic expression and philosophical perceptions of the world, came to Europe by way of the sedentary farming communities in the Fertile Crescent 8,000 years ago. ..,

.., Shigir Idol findings revealed the extent to which preservation biases affect our understanding of Paleolithic art. “Most of the art must have been made of wood and other perishables, ... Which makes it clear that arguments about the wealth of mobiliary art in, say, the Upper Paleolithic of Germany or France by comparison to southern Europe, are largely nonsensical ..."

nd what do the engravings mean? Svetlana Savchenko, the artifact’s curator and an author on the study, speculates that the eight faces may well contain encrypted information about ancestor spirits, the boundary between earth and sky, or a creation myth. Although the monument is unique, Dr. Savchenko sees a resemblance to the stone sculptures of what has long been considered the world’s oldest temple, Göbekli Tepe, whose ruins are in present-day Turkey, some 1,550 miles away. The temple’s stones were carved around 11,000 years ago, which makes them 1,500 years younger than the Shigir Idol. ...

FULL STORY:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/science/archaeology-shigir-idol-.html

PUBLISHED REPORT: (Limited Access)
The Shigir idol in the context of early art in Eurasia
ThomasTerberger, MikhailZhilin, SvetlanaSavchenko
Quaternary International
Volume 573, 30 January 2021, Pages 1-3.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.10.052

SOURCE: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618220306789?via=ihub