12,000-Year-Old Sculpture Found in a Peat Bog | The Shigir Idol

The Shigir Idol is over twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and about the same age as the earliest settlement at the famous Gobekli Tepe archaeological site making it the oldest known wooden sculpture. People who carved it lived through a dramatic climate change at the end of the last ice age. Discovered in 1890 in a peat bog on the eastern slope of the Middle Urals, the idol is covered in geometric patterns among which human-like faces are scattered. A head with an uneasy expression tops the sculpture.