*That's twice as old as the Pyramids.
*Imagine thousands of the things, visible from miles around.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/11000-year-old-statue-unearthed-siberia-may-reveal-ancient-views-taboos-and-demons
In 1894, gold prospectors digging up a peat bog near the Russian city of Yekaterinburg unearthed something bizarre: a carved wooden idol 5 meters long. Carefully smoothed into a plank, the piece was covered front and back with recognizable human faces and hands, along with zigzag lines and other mysterious details. It also had a recognizably human head, with its mouth open in an “o.” For more than a century, the statue was displayed as a curiosity in a Yekaterinburg museum, assumed to be at most a few thousand years old.
This week, a paper published in the journal Antiquity argues that the statue was crafted from a single larchwood log 11,600 years ago, making it one of the world’s oldest examples of monumental art. In age and appearance although not material, the authors write, the so-called Shigir Idol resembles the stone sculptures of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which are often cited as the first monumental ritual structures. Both monuments represent a leap beyond the naturalistic images of the ice age.
The idol also shows that large-scale, complex art emerged in more than one place—and that it was the handiwork of hunter-gatherers and not, as was once assumed, of later farming societies. “We have to conclude hunter-gatherers had complex ritual and expression of ideas. Ritual doesn’t start with farming, but with hunter-gatherers,” says Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and a co-author of the paper....
