Is the Shigir idol really 12,000 years old?

In 1890 in northern Russia, a group of gold miners were digging around the Shigir peat bog 62 miles north of Yekaterinburg when they uncovered pieces of a wooden statue. Initially they didn’t think anything of it because it didn’t contain anything valuable or distinctive, so it was just placed in storage.

The piece now known as the Shigir idol was found again during the 1990s and studied to determine its age, which was dated to be around 9,750 years old. The idol has recently been re-dated using more advanced technology and a new date of 12,100 years old has been found, based off the age of the wood it was carved from which contained 159 growth rings.

Why is this new date so significant?

This new date of 12,100 years would mean that it was carved around 10,000 BC, which was right at the end of the ice age. This may not sound like much on its own but during this time, humans didn’t even have the ability to make pottery yet, and were a long way off from discovering metal. The oldest known structures on earth are mostly located around the Mediterranean and Middle East, which would have been the first areas of the earth to warm up after the last glacial period of the ice age. To find an intact piece of this detail so far north is unheard of, and nothing even close to its age has been discovered in the same area.

As for the purpose of the statue it seems it will forever remain unknown, but it does contain a number of symbols and shapes that would have represented things. The names of the gods of the ancient people who made the Shigir idol will never be known, nor will the meaning of the engravings on the statue, but some researchers have come up with a few interesting theories.

Waving lines usually represent something like water, a path, horizon or something similar, and there are much more varied symbols on the front and back of the main head. This had led to theories of the statue representing things like the creation of the world from their understanding, or a map of the known land leading up to some kind of holy site.

What do we know about the people who made it?

If the piece really is as old as they say, then that means the creators would have been in the Palaeolithic era. It wasn’t until the following neolithic period that people discovered pottery, and not for thousands of years later they found out about metal. This means that the creators were very firmly still in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and would have shared the land with woolly mammoths and other giant beasts.

They would have worn clothing made from animal skins and lived in huts covered in the hides from their kills. They were still a long way from farming and didn’t have the ability to do so anyway due to the climate. So how did these primitive people manage to build such a 17ft tall wooden statue and what does it mean? unfortunately the answer will never be known, but if the dates are correct, the Shigor idol would have been made about 7,000 years before the first Egyptian pyramid was built.