In 1894, gold prospectors near Yekaterinburg, Russia, found a broken wooden sculpture in a peat bog named Shigir. It was assumed to be perhaps a few thousand years old, but recent radiocarbon dating shows it to be just a little older than that. The latest analysis shows it to be 11,600 years old.
While certainly nowhere near as impressive a feat as the approximately contemporary Gobekeli Tepe, it’s still a remarkable thing, showing a considerable commitment to a piece of art well before any currently understood civilization. Eleven thousand years ago is a *long* time; the oldest of the Egyptian pyramids, the step-pyramid of Djoser, is “only” 4660 or so years old. This thing is about two and a half times older still.
Modern humans have been around, depending on just how you want to define “modern humans,” for anywhere from about 50,000 to 150,000 or so years. During the great bulk of that time our accomplishments and history are a virtually complete black hole. Only a few scattered bits and pieces have survived. All our tales of greatness, all our dreams and hopes and fears, failures and success… pffft. Gone. Unremembered, as if they had never been.
