In the 1890s, gold miners pulled a wooden idol from a peat bog that revealed Ice Age art older than the pyramids

Gold miners working in the Urals discovered it in the 1890s and would eventually change our understanding of ancient human culture. They dragged a huge carved wooden figure from the depths of a waterlogged peat bog. The human shaped statue, which today is known as the Shigir Idol, was carved out of a single trunk of larch tree. At the time of its discovery it was regarded as an interesting local curiosity, but would later be acknowledged as one of the most important archaeological finds ever made.The material of the Shigir Idol is truly remarkable. Most of the ancient art we find today is made of stone, bone, or metal, because those materials stand the test of time. Wood on the other hand is prone to quick rotting. The statue was naturally preserved in the Ural peat bog, sealed in the mud deep down and prevented from rotting by cutting off the oxygen.The microbes and bacteria that typically rot wood couldn’t survive without oxygen. The damp, swampy atmosphere kept the fine work of the carving intact, a tangible connection to woodworking from centuries ago that would have otherwise disappeared from the planet.The amazing truth about how old it isFor years scientists debated the age of the idol. That changed with the advent of modern scientific methods such as radiocarbon dating. Tests revealed the statue was carved over 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, shocking the scientific community and rewriting history.The new timeline, published in a research report in the journal Nature, has forced experts to re-evaluate everything they knew about early human history, the report said. It was determined to be twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and the oldest known monumental wooden sculpture in the world.Many historians used to assume that complex art and big symbolic structures were only created by later, settled farming societies. That theory was dashed by the extreme age of the Shigir Idol. The findings suggest that hunter-gatherers at the end of the Ice Age already had well-developed spiritual lives, complex belief systems and the skills to produce large-scale symbolic art, prompting wonder at the achievements of early human culture. A secret world of human creativityThe sheer size and detail of the statue suggests a community willing to devote a huge amount of time, planning and manual labour to a non-practical object. It has many faces carved into its surface with geometric patterns such as zigzags and straight lines. We can’t read the precise meaning of these mysterious markings today, but they obviously had great meaning for the people who created them.The fact that the statue survived points to a major problem in archaeology known as preservation bias, which can give us feelings of respect for the difficulties of uncovering history. The idea is that our view of history is often distorted because we only find objects made of long-lasting materials. According to new research published in the Nature Portfolio, ancient woodworking artifacts have been preserved because of exceptional burial conditions in most cases.If wood had survived more often down the millennia, our museums might be full of ancient wooden masks, posts and monuments. The Shigir Idol is a priceless testament to a vast lost world of organic art that has rotted elsewhere.In the end, this wooden giant is a gift and a warning to modern historians. It shows our forebears were far more imaginative and culturally sophisticated than we tend to assume. At the same time it is a reminder that the physical evidence we dig out of the ground is a tiny, lucky fraction of the rich human story that actually happened.