Thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians quarried even the first block of granite for the great pyramids, a massive wooden totem nearly 17.5 feet tall fell into a peat bog in the western fringes of Siberia, Russia. There it lay, preserved in a kind of natural time capsule, until it was discovered in 1894.
Called the Big Shigir Idol, the mysterious statue has baffled researchers for decades due to the coded hieroglyphics covering its surface. While some have surmised that it may contain stories about the creation of the world by ancient man, others believe it to be nothing more than decoration. One thing we do know for sure: This thing is old — really, really, old.
Now, with even more hi-tech dating methods, it is found to be 11,000 years old (no longer 'roughly') which is quite significant in terms of putative ice ages and sea level changes. None of that is mentioned in the article though.
Back in 1997, an initial analysis using radiocarbon dating placed the Shigir Idol's age at roughly 9,500 years. A new analysis this year using seven small wooden samples from the Idol placed inside an accelerated mass spectrometer determined it to be 11,000 years old.
The totem appears to have been preserved more or less intact but if the dating can be subsequently found to be out by one and a half thousand years, does that not have implications for other remains elsewhere such as 'bog bodies' (Lindow Man etc.)?