⏳ Dating the Shigir Idol took three decades and two methods. A 1997 Moscow + St. Petersburg radiocarbon test said ~9,500 years ago, but critics suspected conservation treatments had skewed it — big samples mixed deep wood with treated surface. So Zhilin's Russian-German team used AMS (counting individual carbon-14 atoms) on seven samples from one counted tree ring sequence, dating it to ~9,600 BC. A 2021 follow-up with Terberger and Savchenko counted 159 growth rings: inner wood ~12,250 years old, tree felled ~150 years later → creation ~10,100 BC, about 12,100 years ago. That makes it older than Stonehenge and Göbekli Tepe 🌍🌲
AMS radiocarbon dating pushes the Shigir Idol to about 12,100 years old
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Key facts
- In 1997 two laboratories, one in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg, dated the idol's wood by conventional radiocarbon testing to approximately 9,500 years ago.
- The 1997 result drew widespread skepticism because an elaborate monument challenged expectations of hunter-gatherer societies; critics questioned whether conservation treatments had contaminated the samples.
- Conventional radiocarbon dating needed relatively large wood samples, which could mix deep interior wood with material nearer the treated surface, and conservation treatments had shifted the resulting dates.
- A joint Russian-German team including Mikhail Zhilin published in Antiquity in 2018, with sampling begun in 2014, using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), which counts individual carbon-14 atoms and requires much smaller, more precisely targeted samples.
- Seven samples taken from different positions within a counted tree ring sequence dated the idol's creation to around 9,600 BC.
- In a 2021 follow-up study, Zhilin, German archaeologist Thomas Terberger and museum researcher Svetlana Savchenko focused on the deepest samples farthest from the treated surface, which had generally produced older dates, and proposed the inner wood was about 12,250 years old.
- Tree ring analysis identified 159 annual growth rings, indicating roughly 150 years between formation of the inner wood and the felling of the tree, leading to a proposed creation date of about 10,100 BC, roughly 12,100 years ago.
- If the dating holds, the idol predates Stonehenge and the pyramids' recorded history by thousands of years, and predates Gobekli Tepe, described as the world's oldest known monumental site, by several centuries.
- Larch and pine pollen dating to the Younger Dryas, found at Shigir and in nearby basins, supports the presence of trees in the region.
Sources
cambridge.org
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Shigir Idolen.wikipedia.org
is the oldest known wooden sculpture. The initial radiocarbon dating carried out by G. I. gave an age of around 9,500 years. In the 1990s, when this first ...
11500-Year-Old Sculpture Alters Understanding of Early Artartsy.net
The Shigir Idol was first unearthed in the Ural mountains … radiocarbon dating in 1990 placed the age of the object at roughly 9,800 years old.
How the World's Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Reshaping ...nytimes.com
At 12500 years old, the Shigir Idol is by far the earliest known work of ritual art ... The radiocarbon analysis in 1997 was greeted with ...
The Shigir idol in the context of early art in Eurasiasciencedirect.com
by T Terberger · 2021 · Cited by 21 — In 1890 the so called “Shigir Idol” was found in a peat bog ・ 1990s first conventional radiocarbon dates suggested a Mesolithic ・ early date makes the find ...
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