Prehistory 2 Shamanism 3 Shigir Idol 4 Potters Wheel 5 Reliefs 6 Prehistoric Art
How the Earth's Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Reshaping Prehistory
At 12,500 years old, the Shigir Idol is past far the primeval known work of ritual art. Only decay has kept others from being found.
Four views of the head of the Shigir Idol, a nine-foot-tall totem pole made of larch and discovered in a Russian peat bog in 1890. Credit... Sverdlovsk Regional Museum
The world'due south oldest known wooden sculpture — a ix-foot-tall totem pole thousands of years one-time — looms over a hushed chamber of an obscure Russian museum in the Ural Mountains, non far from the Siberian border. Every bit mysterious equally the huge stone figures of Easter Island, the Shigir Idol, as information technology is called, is a landscape of uneasy spirits that baffles the modern onlooker.
Dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in 1890, the relic, or what'south left of information technology, is carved from a great slab of freshly cut larch. Scattered among the geometric patterns (zigzags, chevrons, herringbones) are eight human faces, each with slashes for eyes that peer non and so benignly from the front and back planes.
The topmost mouth, fix in a head shaped like an inverted teardrop, is wide open and slightly unnerving. "The face at the very top is not a passive i," said Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and caput of inquiry at the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, in Germany. "Whether it screams or shouts or sings, it projects authority, maybe malevolent authorization. It's not immediately a friend of yours, much less an aboriginal friend of yours."
In archaeology, portable prehistoric sculpture is called "mobiliary art." With the miraculous exception of the Shigir Idol, no Stone Historic period forest carvings survive. The statue's age was a matter of conjecture until 1997, when information technology was carbon-dated past Russian scientists to nigh ix,500 years one-time, an age that struck most scholars as fanciful. Skeptics argued that the statue'southward complex iconography was across the achieve of the hunter-gatherer societies at the fourth dimension; unlike contemporaneous works from Europe and Asia featuring straightforward depictions of animals and hunt scenes, the Shigir Idol is busy with symbols and abstractions.
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 applied science yielded a remarkably early origin: roughly 11,600 years ago, a time when Eurasia was even so transitioning out of the last ice age. The statue was more twice as one-time as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, besides as, by many millenniums, the first known work of ritual art.
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A new study that Dr. Terberger wrote with some of the same colleagues in Quaternary International, further skews our understanding of prehistory by pushing back the original date of the Shigir Idol past another 900 years, placing it in the context of the early art in Eurasia.
"The idol was carved during an era of neat climate change, when early forests were spreading beyond a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia," Dr. Terberger said. "The mural changed, and the art — figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock — did, too, maybe as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered."
Written with an eye toward disentangling Western science from colonialism, Dr. Terberger'southward latest newspaper challenges the ethnocentric notion that pretty much everything, including symbolic expression and philosophical perceptions of the earth, came to Europe by way of the sedentary farming communities in the Fertile Crescent 8,000 years ago.
"Ever since the Victorian era, Western scientific discipline has been a story of superior European noesis and the cognitively and behaviorally inferior 'other,'" Dr. Terberger said. "The hunter-gatherers are regarded as inferior to early agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, the archaeological show from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and neglected. For many of my colleagues, the Urals were a very terra incognita."
To João Zilhão, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Barcelona who was non involved in the study, the have-home bulletin of the research is that absence of evidence is non bear witness of absence.
"It's like to the 'Neanderthals did not make fine art' fable, which was entirely based on absence of evidence," he said. "And and so the evidence was institute and the fable exposed for what information technology was. Likewise, the overwhelming scientific consensus used to hold that mod humans were superior in key ways, including their ability to innovate, communicate and adapt to different environments. Nonsense, all of it."
Dr. Zilhão said the Shigir Idol findings revealed the extent to which preservation biases affect our understanding of Paleolithic fine art. "Most of the art must accept been made of wood and other perishables," he said. "Which makes information technology clear that arguments about the wealth of mobiliary art in, say, the Upper Paleolithic of Germany or France by comparing to southern Europe, are largely nonsensical and an artifact of tundra (where at that place are no trees and y'all use ivory, which is archaeologically visible) versus open up wood environments (where you'd use wood, which is archaeologically invisible)."
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Olaf Jöris, of the Leibniz Inquiry Institute for Archæology, agreed. "The new Shigir evidence makes archaeologists fantasize of how the archaeological record may have looked if wooden remains had been preserved in greater abundance," he said.
The Shigir Idol, named for the bog almost Kirovgrad in which information technology was found, is presumed to take rested on a rock base for perhaps two or 3 decades before toppling into a long-gone paleo-lake, where the peat's antimicrobial properties protected it like a fourth dimension capsule. In the mid-19th century, gold was discovered beneath the mire, and the landowner, Count Alexey Stenbok-Fermor, hired laborers to mine the open-air site for ore. He instructed them to salvage any other objects they unearthed.
Thirteen anxiety down the idol was discovered, and retrieved in 10 fragments. The pieces were carted 60 miles to Yekaterinburg, the city where, 28 years after, the last czar of the Russian Empire, Emperor Nicholas II; his wife, Alexandra; and their children would be executed by the Bolsheviks. In Yekaterinburg, the count's donation was displayed with bone arrowheads, slotted os daggers, a polished elk antler and other ancient bog finds at the Urals Natural Sciences Social club, today known as the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore.
The director of the museum allowed the railroad stationmaster, Dmitry Lobanov, an aspiring archaeologist, to assemble the main fragments into a nine-foot-tall figure with legs crossed tightly in a pose that potty-training parents of any epoch might recognize.
"Information technology was non a scientific construction," said the archeologist Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian University of Sciences, a co-author of the new study. The idol stayed locked in that uncomfortable position until 1914, when the archaeologist Vladimir Tolmachev suggested incorporating the remnants into the finished work — increasing its superlative to near 17 and a half feet. Much of the bottom half subsequently went missing; Mr. Tolmachev's sketches of the department are all that remain.
For more than a century, the Shigir Idol was considered a marvel, assumed to be at most a few grand years one-time. The radiocarbon analysis in 1997 was greeted with derision by some scientists who institute the conclusions implausibly quondam. Some doubters even suggested that the statue was a forgery.
Prototype
Dr. Terberger and his colleagues have settled that question in their new report, demonstrating conclusively that the larch was a literal tree of noesis. The timber was at least 159 years old when the ancient carpenters began to shape it.
"The rings tell us that trees were growing very slowly, every bit the temperature was withal quite common cold," Dr. Terberger said. Given the speed with which larch logs rot and warp, the researchers determined that the idol was fashioned from a tree that had just been cut. And from the widths and depths of the markings, Dr. Zhilin deduced that the cuts were made past at least three sharp chisels, 2 of which were probably polished rock adzes and the other perchance the lower jaw of a beaver, teeth intact. (On the subject of beaver mandibles, Dr. Terberger respectfully disagrees. "During the menstruum of rapid cooling from about 10,700 B.C. to ix,600 B.C. that nosotros phone call the Younger Dryas, no beavers should take been around in the Transurals," he said.)
And what do the engravings mean? Svetlana Savchenko, the antiquity'southward curator and an author on the study, speculates that the eight faces may well contain encrypted information almost ancestor spirits, the boundary between globe and heaven, or a cosmos myth. Although the monument is unique, Dr. Savchenko sees a resemblance to the stone sculptures of what has long been considered the earth's oldest temple, Göbekli Tepe, whose ruins are in present-solar day Turkey, some one,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.
Marcel Niekus, an archaeologist with the Foundation for Stone Historic period Research in kingdom of the netherlands, said that the updated, older age of the Shigir Idol confirmed that it "represents a unique and unparalleled find in Europe. Ane could wonder how many similar pieces have been lost over time due to poor preservation conditions."
The similarity of the geometric motifs to others across Europe in that era, he added, "is bear witness of long-distance contacts and a shared sign language over vast areas. The sheer size of the idol also seems to point it was meant every bit a marking in the landscape that was supposed to be seen past other hunter-gatherer groups — maybe mark the border of a territory, a warning or welcoming sign."
Dr. Zhilin has spent much of the last 12 years investigating other peat bogs in the Urals. At one site he uncovered ample evidence of prehistoric carpentry — woodworking tools and a massive pino plank, roughly eleven,300 years old, that he believes had been smoothed with an adze. "There are many more than unexplored bogs in the mountains," Dr. Zhilin said. Unfortunately, there are no ongoing excavations.
During a contempo video conversation from his home in Moscow, Dr. Zhilin asked his interviewer in the United States: "What do you think is the hardest thing to detect in the Stone Age archaeology of the Urals?"
A pause: Sites?
"No," he said, sighing softly. "Funding."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/science/archaeology-shigir-idol-.html
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