The wooden figure found the Mesolithic - Middle Stone Age and turned out to be the oldest surviving large sculpture of mankind. An international group of researchers, with the participation of Russian scientists, carried out radiocarbon dating of the Big Shigir idol, which is kept in the Sverdlovsk Museum of Local Lore in Yekaterinburg and was originally more than five meters high.
Dating has shown that it was created 11,600 years ago - earlier than any other large sculpture known to people.
The idol was made thousands of years before the freshwater lake on the site of the Black Sea merged with the Atlantic Ocean basin and became saline. Prior dating of the idol underestimated its antiquity. Earlier, the Deputy Minister of Culture of Russia tried to prosecute scientists who studied the age of the artifact in court under Article 243 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The corresponding scientific article was published in Antiquity.
The oldest sculpture made of wood, the Shigir idol, in the premises of the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore.
The Big Shigir idol was found in the Ural peat bogs in the 19th century. The owner of the land, Count Aleksey Aleksandrovich Stenbock-Fermor, donated the idol to the Ural Society of Natural History Lovers (now the Sverdlovsk Museum of Local Lore), and at that time the height of the carved sculpture was 5.3 meters. However, in the riots that followed the revolution, its lower part was lost under unknown circumstances, and now it is only 3.4 meters high.
The idol, in addition to the head with clearly distinguishable features of the face, has seven more "masks" - areas on the body where this or that animal or object is depicted.
The question of its dating has always been quite acute. It is not like other famous idols and is not related to any known archaeological culture. Therefore, it was dated by the Iron, the Bronze Age, or the Neolithic. Doubts about his age have led to several radiocarbon dating, which has shown unusually ancient dates - up to 9,000 years ago.
A fragment of the oldest sculpture made of wood, the Shigir idol, in the premises of the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore.
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The new work used the most modern means of radiocarbon dating. With their help, archaeologists obtained the age of 11,600 years - the deep Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age). Thus, the Big Shigir idol turned out to be the oldest large sculpture known to mankind. Older than him are only small wearable figures of the Paleolithic era, a few centimeters in size. The age of the idol indicates developed religious ideas even before the transition of humanity to agriculture and cattle breeding.
The idol is so old that it was made almost four thousand years before the rise of the Black Sea. According to a number of theories substantiated by a multitude of geological and archaeological finds, before the events that occurred between 7,500-8,000 years ago, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake. And then the isthmus that separated it from the Mediterranean Sea was overcome by a titanic volume of salt water, which flooded the coastal territory and turned the lake into a sea.
For almost a year, the amount of seawater poured out in the form of a colossal waterfall was 200 times the daily volume of Niagara. In the mythology of the ancient Greeks, this event was depicted as the "Dardanian flood", and the researchers also associate it with the description of the Old Testament Flood, which also occurred geographically in the area of the modern Black Sea.
In 2014, the Deputy Minister of Culture of Russia Grigory Pirumov wrote a statement to the police of the Sverdlovsk Region, in which he accused the researchers (not the authors of the new work, but one of the first groups involved in radiocarbon dating) of damaging the idol made from Siberian larch during the analysis. … Only in 2016 the case was closed due to the fact that experts did not find traces of the corresponding damage on the idol.