Thanks BenLurkin.
- World's oldest wooden statue is TWICE as old as the pyramids: New analysis reveals Shigir Idol is...
- Mysterious Russian Statue Is 11,000 Years Old - Twice As Old As The Pyramids
Posted on 03/26/2021 7:20:06 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Gold prospectors first discovered the so-called Shigir Idol at the bottom of a peat bog in Russia’s Ural mountain range in 1890. The unique object—a nine-foot-tall totem pole composed of ten wooden fragments carved with expressive faces, eyes and limbs and decorated with geometric patterns—represents the oldest known surviving work of wooden ritual art in the world.
More than a century after its discovery, archaeologists continue to uncover surprises about this astonishing artifact. As Thomas Terberger, a scholar of prehistory at Göttingen University in Germany, and his colleagues wrote in the journal Quaternary International in January, new research suggests the sculpture is 900 years older than previously thought.
Based on extensive analysis, Terberger’s team now estimates that the object was likely crafted about 12,500 years ago, at the end of the Last Ice Age. Its ancient creators carved the work from a single larch tree with 159 growth rings, the authors write in the study.
“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” Terberger tells Franz Lidz of the New York Times. “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.”
According to Sarah Cascone of Artnet News, the new findings indicate that the rare artwork predates Stonehenge, which was created around 5,000 years ago, by more than 7,000 years. It’s also twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids, which date to roughly 4,500 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
A longer, more fruitful growing season was "challenging" ?
These people weren't growers.
My reply was directed to the fact that they were hunters, not growers. In fact, the people of the Eurasian steppes were known as the "mammoth hunters". The mammoth and other vast herds died out--from that huge area--when the trees came back.
There IS game in the forest, but not in the huge herds found in grasslands.
A few thousand miles to the south, people were indeed learning to grow stuff and tame animals--but not the Russian steppe people. Not for a few more thousand years.
This “challenge” of a warming climate led to the agricultural revolution, settlements then cities, and civilization with spare time for such things as creating writing systems.
Men adapt and create.
I’m not implying that fact at all.
As I just said, while the tundra steppe was returning to forest, people thousands of miles away in the Middle East, Nile Valley and central China were starting to plant crops and domesticate animals...
I’m glad it happened.
Still, imagine hunting mammoth and woolly rhinos with a Weatherby Mark V SBGM!
They’d make a totem pole with your likeness on it!
implying!? I meant denying...
LOLOL!
/sang that in my head
Didn’t mean to imply you were denying that. :)
I was just thinking of the Gaia worshipers who think the world is meant to be static. Of course I believe most of them are not true believers. They are just power hungry and will cynically use any excuse to tell others what to do.
All living things adapt or die when the environment changes, including us, and I’m glad we are so adaptable, and I’ll bet mammoth steaks were very tasty.
Thanks BenLurkin.
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