Shigir Idol

The Shigir Idol is the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world. It was carved from a larch trunk roughly 11,500 years ago, at the very start of the Holocene, twice as long ago as the building of the Great Pyramid, and it survived only because it lay in an acidic, oxygen-free peat bog. It was found on 24 January 1890 at a depth of about four metres in the Shigir peat bog, an area already known for prehistoric finds from open-cast gold workings, on the eastern slope of the Middle Urals, near today's Kirovgrad. It came out in ten pieces; the surviving parts were assembled to a height of about 2.8 metres, but a reconstruction of 1914 suggested the original was some 5.3 metres tall, and some of the extra fragments are now known only from drawings.

The figure is a flat plank topped by a carved head with eyes, nose and mouth. Its body is covered with zig-zags, chevrons and horizontal lines that may stand for ribs, and further faces appear at intervals down its length, like a totem pole. Researchers have read the pattern as a creation myth, a map, forest spirits or a warning marker; nobody knows. Studies have shown that the carvers used chisels of three sizes and that some of the faces were cut with a tool made from a beaver's jaw.

Radiocarbon dates of about 9,500 years were at first dismissed as too old for hunter-gatherers; later analyses pushed the date back further, and in 2021 a German-Russian team published results placing it near the start of the Holocene. The idol is displayed in a sealed, climate-controlled case in the Museum of History and Archaeology of the Urals, a branch of the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore.

Getting there

The museum is at Lenin Avenue 69/10 in Yekaterinburg, about 100 km from the find site near Kirovgrad. Yekaterinburg's Koltsovo Airport (SVX) serves the city.