Human-Like Statue Discovered In Siberia Is Older Than Stonehenge And Pyramids

As The New York Times reported, this was after gold was discovered nearby and the land's owner Count Alexey Stenbok-Fermor hired workers in the hopes that more could be found.

But perhaps his most important order was to save anything else that turned up in the bog.

According to The New York Times, researchers were stumped at how old the statue — known as the Shigir Idol — could possibly be until Russian scientists were able to subject it to carbon dating in 1997.

At the time, it was considered about 9,500 years old, which some scholars considered so preposterous that they figured it had to be a forgery.

That's because they believed hunter-gatherers at the time weren't capable of such expressive art. Instead, they were operating under the assumption that much of the beginnings of what now makes up European culture emerged 8,000 years ago from a region of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.

The team was led by Dr. Thomas Terberger, who described the idol as "carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia."

In other words, his team discovered that the idol was at least 11,600 years old. Upon further review in a new study, the date of the sculpture's creation was pushed back another 900 years to 12,500 years ago.

Terberger suggests that the end of the ice age at the time led people who would have otherwise scrawled on cave walls to become familiar with newer, more wooded environments.

And since wood can be fairly perishable as a building material, that means we never would have discovered their ancient woodworking skills if the Shigir Idol hadn't fallen where it did.

In Terberger's words, "The rings tell us that trees were growing very slowly, as the temperature was still quite cold."

The study's co-author, Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, deduced that the tree was cut down by three sharp chisels, two of which were likely made from polished stone adzes.

He floated the possibility that the other chisel was made from a beaver jaw, but Terberger said no beavers were likely to exist in the region at the time.

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, this makes the Shigir Idol about 7,000 years older than Stonehenge and more than twice as old as the pyramids of Egypt constructed about 4,500 years ago.

As João Zilhão from the University of Barcelona told The New York Times, "It’s similar to the ‘Neanderthals did not make art’ fable, which was entirely based on absence of evidence.

"And then the evidence was found and the fable exposed for what it was. Likewise, the overwhelming scientific consensus used to hold that modern humans were superior in key ways, including their ability to innovate, communicate and adapt to different environments. Nonsense, all of it."

h/t: The New York Times