Oldest Wooden Statue in the World: The 11,000-Year-Old Shigir Idol

The Shigir Idol is considered to be one of the most important and mysterious pieces of pre-historic art from ancient Europe. The ancient wooden carving, which today sits in a museum in Russia, has been dated at around 11,000 years old, making it 5,000 to 6,000 years older than Britain’s famous Stonehenge monument and twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids. 

Not only is it the oldest wooden statue in the world, but standing as tall as a two-story building, it is also the highest wooden statue from the ancient world.  Covered with strange markings and geometric symbols using beaver teeth tools, some researchers believe this carving contains coded information about the creation of the world left behind by man from the Mesolithic era.

Discovery of the Shigir Idol

The Shigir Idol was discovered in January 1890 in the Sverdlovsk region, in the western fringes of Siberia, Russia.  It was preserved, as if in a time capsule, about 4 meters (13.5 feet) below the surface, and protected through the millennia by a layer of peat bog on the site of an open air gold mine.  Its survival was due to the anti-bacterial effects of the peat, which prevented it from rotting. 

When it was discovered, the idol was in numerous fragments.  A Russian professor by the name of Dmitry Lobanov, pieced together the fragments to reconstruct a figure roughly 2.8 meters in height.  Unfortunately, almost 2 meters of the artifact had gone missing during Russin’s 20th century political turmoil. However, Siberian archeologist Vladimir Tolmachev, had carefully recorded  all the pieces through sketches, and in 1914, he was able to incorporated other unused fragments into the finished work, increasing its height to 5.3 meters (17.4ft).  Later, some of these pieces were accidentally destroyed, so Tolmachev’s drawings are all that remain of them.