Russia’s oldest idol turned out to be older than the Black Sea

The wooden figure found the Mesolithic – the middle stone age and was the oldest of the large surviving sculptures of mankind. An international group of researchers with the participation of Russian scientists conducted radiocarbon dating of the Big Shigirsky idol, which is stored in the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Yekaterinburg and initially had a height of more than five meters.
The dating showed that it was created 11,600 years ago — earlier than any other large-sized sculpture known to people.
The idol was made thousands of years before the freshwater lake at the site of the Black Sea connected to the basin of the Atlantic Ocean and became salty. Continue reading →