ART × BELIEFS

The Wooden Idol of Shigir

~12,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

In 1890, gold miners cutting into a peat bog in the Urals pulled out planks of carved larch that assemble into a figure over five metres tall: a head with an open mouth, a body covered in zigzags and at least seven more faces. Radiocarbon dates place the Shigir idol near the beginning of the Holocene, around 12,000 years ago, which makes it the oldest monumental wooden sculpture known anywhere.

Why it matters

Almost everything ever carved in wood is gone; the bog kept this one, and it implies all the others. Hunter-gatherers of the early Holocene were raising monumental figures loaded with imagery we cannot read, in the same centuries that other hunter-gatherers were erecting the carved pillars of Göbekli Tepe. Monuments did not wait for farming; only their survival did.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Accelerator radiocarbon dates on the wood place the sculpture near the start of the Holocene, around 10,000 BCE, and its zigzag ornament fits Late Glacial art. Dissenters argue from when the bog began to accumulate peat, and from stylistic parallels dated to the fourth and third millennia BCE; some suggest the carvers worked a trunk that was already ancient when they found it. The early reading currently has the direct measurements on its side.

Sources

1. Terberger et al. (2020), Quaternary International · The Shigir idol in the context of early art in Eurasiadoi:10.1016/j.quaint.2020.10.025
2. Koksharov (2020), Quaternary International · A new subject in the study of the Great Shigir Idoldoi:10.1016/j.quaint.2020.05.034
3. Savchenko (2024), Camera Praehistorica · To the question of definition of the age of the Big Shigir idoldoi:10.31250/2658-3828-2024-1-72-93

Our species’ history as one day

23:05:0854 min 51 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day