The statuettes, more than 4.5 thousand years old, were discovered by archaeologists while examining the Itkol II burial ground in Khakassia. A joint expedition of the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IIMK RAS) and the Russian Geographical Society worked here for the second season within the framework of the project "The Secret of Ancient Siberian Artists".
“In the 2017 field season, we found rare artifacts in one of the burials: the head of a woman made of the mineral steatite (known as a“soap”stone) with elaborate facial features and a head of a horse or dog made of horn,” says Andrey Polyakov. - Probably, these are children's toys, which were made of soft materials - fabric, leather, and the heads were made of stone or horn. It is difficult to say who their owner was, but there are no details that would indicate the elite nature of the burial, so we can assume that it was an ordinary child."
The finds from Itkol II belong to the Okunev culture. This archaeological culture of people of a mixed Caucasoid-Mongoloid type who lived in the Early Bronze Age in the Minusinsk steppes on the Middle Yenisei (XXV-XVIII centuries BC) has no analogues in Northern Eurasia in terms of the richness and diversity of artistic heritage. It got its name from the Okunev ulus tract in the south of Khakassia, where in 1928 a burial ground with artifacts of this culture was discovered. The art of the Okunev culture is represented by rock carvings, numerous objects of small artistic plastics and “Okunev steles” - anthropomorphic stone statues, sometimes reaching a height of several meters. Anthropologists do not exclude that representatives of this culture have the greatest kinship with American Indians for the whole of Siberia.