The world’s oldest-known wooden sculpture has been discovered to be even older than had been previously thought all these years! This is a fascinating piece of art history as it is now on record to date as far back as prehistoric time into the stone age.

The nine feet totem pole, known as the Shigir Idol was discovered in 1890 by gold miners in the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains just outside of Yekaterinburg in present-day Russia. The relic is carved from a great slab of freshly cut larch. It is divided into ten fragments decorated in geometric patterns which contain eight imposing human faces.

When it was initially carbon-dated by Russian scientists in 1997, it was put to be about 9,500 years old, an age that many scholars and experts deemed implausible. The disbelief was due to the statue’s complex iconography which is believed to be beyond the scope of the hunter-gatherers' civilization of the time, as it featured decorative symbols and abstractions. Meanwhile, artifacts of the same time period from Europe and Asia feature depictions of animals and hunting symbolism. 

However, the wooden sculpture piece of ritual art - which is being stored at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, a remote institution in Russia’s Ural Mountains - held an even much more unbelievable secret, and in 2014, Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, Germany, and a team of German and Russian scientists unearthed the world-record shocker. 

After testing samples from the pristine core of the larch wood idol—rather than the surface, which had undergone numerous conservation treatments over the more than 100 years since its discovery - using the more advanced accelerator mass spectrometry technology, it yielded a remarkably earlier origin, closer to 11,600 years ago. This moved its creation to a time when Eurasia was still coming out of the last Ice Age, meaning it was more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, as well as, by many millennia, the first known work of ritual art, and cementing the Shigir Idol to the echelon of art history.

Now, a new study published in Quaternary International has pushed that date back by a further 900 years, making the Shigir Idol to be about 12,500 years old and the world’s oldest wooden sculpture, as well as the only surviving Stone Age wooden artifact. This study, written by Terberger and some of his colleagues, further modifies our understanding of prehistoric society and its civilization.

Probing the dissimilarity from other known prehistoric artifacts, Terberger wrote, “The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late-glacial to postglacial Eurasia. The landscape changed, and the art – figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock – did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”

In regions with large forests, wood would have been readily available to Paleolithic artists, but quick to deteriorate over the centuries. That means that our understanding of these ancient peoples is shaped by preservation biases, and might have been very different had more wooden artifacts like the Shigir Idol survived.

“Ever since the Victorian era, Western science has been a story of superior European knowledge and the cognitively and behaviourally inferior ‘other’,” Terberger says. “The hunter-gatherers are regarded as inferior to early agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the same time, the archaeological evidence from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and neglected. For many of my colleagues, the Urals were a very terra incognita [unknown land].

“Wood working was probably widespread during the Late Glacial to early Holocene,” the paper argues. “We see the Shigir sculpture as a document of a complex symbolic behavior and of the spiritual world of the Late Glacial to Early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Urals.”

Just like this updated discovery concerning the Shigir Idol sculpture, a lot of things we have held as sacrosanct in art history have in fact been shown to be evolving piece of knowledge, thus, it is advisable to keep supporting researches and studies that aim to use advanced means to investigate the authenticity of information as well as preservation of historical art.

Another thing to keep abreast of is the artists and creators whose expertise is creating cultural artifacts and artworks of historical and contemporary times like the artists preserving Africa's cultural heritage through art. Their works can be accessed and bought legally on the leading aggregator of African art, the Aworanka website.