
Wooden Statue Found in Late 1890s Likely Dates Back More Than 11,000 Years - forgingahead
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/statue-found-late-1890s-likely-dates-back-more-11000-years-180968895?no-ist
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8bitsrule
Fascinating object. Got me thinking. While the wood is _probably at least_
that old, the carving isn't necessarily _quite_ that old.

WP says Larch is 'waterproof' and 'resistant to rot when in contact with the
ground'. And it's a conifer that loses its needles in the fall. Now consider
that it can grow as far north as 'the tundra and polar ice' and is 'very long-
lived'.

Consider that the _outside_ was dated at 9800ya in the 1990s, but in 2014 the
_core_ (the oldest part of any tree) dates to 11,600.

Here in the US, the glaciers were done melting to about 45N by 9000 ya.
(Yekaterinburg is at 56N, so maybe more like 7500ya?).

Just for fun, suppose that the wood had been stuck in a glacier for a very
long time, say 2000 years. When the carver found it. Are there any
C14-dating/Russian glaciologist folk here to explain those two sample dates?
Could it have been in a glacier _longer_ than 2000 years?

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codedokode
> While the wood is probably at least that old, the carving isn't necessarily
> quite that old.

The russian article on Wikipedia says that there was a research including
examining the surface with a microscope and it shows that the statue is made
from a freshly chopped tree with stone tools.

The difference is dates is because the research in 2015 was done using another
method [1] . The age of the tree is estimated to be around 160 years old.

[1] [https://phys.org/news/2018-04-wooden-shigir-idol-egyptian-
py...](https://phys.org/news/2018-04-wooden-shigir-idol-egyptian-
pyramids.html)

~~~
8bitsrule
Thanks for the ru.wiki check! Maybe it was carried to the peat bog by
meltwater. (Peat bogs are great for preservation.) 11,600 ya is the world-wide
beginning of Holocene glacial retreat.

If the dates are right it's amazing that this marks that time -and- is a
spectacular cultural marker. Can't help but think of totem poles.

The science has to be done right. Groundwater can contain 'aged carbon', low
in C-14, derived from rocks through which it has passed. Things soaked in it
can look -much- older than they are.

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primitur
Wow, the more time goes on, the more "Behold!! The Protong!" ( * ) seems to be
an accurate assessment of things. He specifically targetted this artifact as
an example of evidence that ancient civilizations were a lot more lucid than
we thought.

Szukalski had some crack-pot ideas (Zermatism, Protong), but the idea that
humans hadn't gotten quite the right perspective on ancient art is one of his
most endearing claims.

(* - [https://www.amazon.com/Behold-Protong-Robert-
Williams/dp/086...](https://www.amazon.com/Behold-Protong-Robert-
Williams/dp/0867195193) \- a fascinating book, if only for the art lover who
wants a perspective not usually proferred by the mainstream..)

~~~
blattimwind
The way I remember history taught in school is essentially "pre-history (first
human settlements)" => giant leap to => "ancient high culture starting 3000
BCE", with a supplementary piece of info going like "well we don't really know
yet what happened between those two". Back then it was clear to me, and so
almost certainly to the researcher/historians of the time, that you don't go
from relatively simple cave paintings to insanely complex languages, forms of
government and far-fetched empires just by snapping a finger twice.

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bloak
As far as I know, we have no reason to believe that the complexity of
languages has changed over the last 200,000 years. The languages spoken by
today's stone-age hunter-gatherers (there still are a few) are not
systematically and fundamentally different from the languages spoken by more
technologically advanced groups.

~~~
BurningFrog
Well, I think we have next to no information about language development for
195,000 of those 200,000 years, so we don't a much reason to believe anything.

I'd speculate that since language skills are important, evolution would have
worked to increase them over that era.

~~~
bloak
I don't know much about human evolution and history... However, if language
skills evolved after humans left Africa then I'd expect them to have evolved a
bit differently in different local populations. Yet innate language skills
seem to be the same everywhere. So I would guess that innate language skills
haven't changed much in the last 100,000 years. So I would guess that people
have been speaking languages like today's languages (in all their glorious
variety) for the last 100,000 years.

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hownottowrite
Actual Study:
[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ea...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/early-
art-in-the-urals-new-research-on-the-wooden-sculpture-from-
shigir/1EE151AB1E571968B10267E48B78362A#)

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ajross
That's interesting and all, but it's been confusingly oversold by the headline
and lede. That an object of this size has been preserved is interesting, but
there's nothing particularly notable about artwork of that age. People have
been carving and painting images for 40-50ky.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I'm under the impression that this is considered intentional art. I could be
mistaken, but the previous carvings and paintings you mention were purely
functional.

What's noteworthy here is intent. I think ;)

~~~
guelo
I don't think that's correct, see
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_the_Upper_Paleolithic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_the_Upper_Paleolithic)

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fovc
How much data do we have on civilizations going back that far? I imagine that
"progress" was not monotonically up, so there might be peaks of development
above the trendline that we don't know about because of missing data

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singularity2001
Interesting that they were discovered near the Ural mountains. Though only a
very weak signal it does somehow ring a bell with göbekli tepe and surrounding
figurines of similar shape.

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crystaln
Why would anyone assume that our species existed for 300k years without making
art? This makes no sense and seems to be the claim that must be proven, not
vice versa.

~~~
guelo
Some anthropologists believe there was some kind of mental revolution in
humans that led to the emergence of art and culture around 50k-80k years ago.

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del_operator
I'm no expert, but examine the front of the Shigir Idol and see three distinct
sections of patterns: lines, single wave, double wave. I was "stumped." I
wanted to get to the root of this.

Borrowing a technique from Carl Sagan's Contact where Arroway and Hadden
interpreted the Vega message, I then thought like I was from Planet X. The
meaning of these three sections became obvious in higher dimensions...

"I am Groot"

