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?
> 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.
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.
i was thinking this too. carving or manipulation time frame methods would be good but out side of possible tools used i dont see it yet and even then it gives a time frame and posibility not neccissarily an actuality. this is an interesting piece though non the less.
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.
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.
In every civilisation there’s founding myths, Romulus and Remus from Rome, Yellow Emperor from China, Abraham from Israel, the Dreaming for indigenous Australians. I wonder how much those myths might actually be telling us about those otherwise undocumented times.
It makes me wonder what founding myths we live with today. I wont even bother to speculate at the risk of promoting flamebait but I imagine our myths are some of our most scared truths. Of course that's not to say they're conspiracies but just very convenient lies.
They’re not necessarily lies. I usually assume myths are faithful transcriptions of actual historical events, just stylized in order to aid in their retelling.
I think the Big Bang “theory” is one. It might be accurate, or maybe our universe is squirting out of a worm hole. Either way we believe our stories of the beginning to be true just as vigorously and reason about them just as much as the ancients did.
>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
See, thats the fascinating thing about crackpot archeology/anthropology/sociology/etc. Eventually, its just a bunch of words - an ontology - with which to describe a complex system.
The idea that the root nature of the language is expressible in human-ideal objects, and that this ontology can persist across 10's of thousands of years of human activity (mostly destructive) as a cultural artifact with a message .. yes, this is difficult to conceive. Or, is it really?
"Far-fetched empires": literally what it means to consider what such an empire, were it in existence 65,000 years ago, would have looked like. Like, literally, its a far-fetched idea to look at a piece of dirt, and then paint a deep picture of what happened to it.
Without such imagination, speculation doesn't begin, and without speculation followed up by careful inspection, the relics would still just be out there, being ignored.
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.
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.
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.
> The languages spoken by today's ... are not systematically and fundamentally different ...
That is a meaningless statement, when there is no consensus on the fundamentals of language, and more so because the Languages of the world differ variously.
I'm not sure what you think how complexity of language is measured. Certainly, there are terms and expressions that had to be invented along with the concepts that they describe, which hunter gatherers don't know, and that's not limited to technology. Emotional content would be much more important on a human scale. I think the question would have to be, whether everyone was able to speak. Which term would the analogous to "literate"?
The only way I can think of for measuring the complexity of a language is an inaccurate empirical one: see how hard it is for speakers of unrelated languages to learn it. That approach would probably confirm that Hausa is harder to learn than Bahasa Indonesia, for example, though whether that's what other people mean by "complexity", I can't say.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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?