Intriguing news. In a cave in Morocco, 33 shell beads were found, which must be about 150 thousand years old. They would be the first jewelry in the world. But is that really so? Wouldn’t the first ornaments have been made of wood? Undoubtedly. But we will never know for certain. Wood decays, because it is made of organic material. Wood rots away.
That is an important difference from figurines carved from the ivory of a mammoth tusk. Representations carved deep into rocks can also withstand the centuries, just like paintings in caves. Even the first jewelry in the world, beads made from shells and found in a cave near the Moroccan city of Essaouira, are still intact after 150 thousand years. But how logical is it that the first humans or hominids would start by choosing a branch from a tree to carve something into it with a sharp stone?
It was therefore a great surprise that an enormous wooden sculpture was found in Russia that must have been made about 11,600 years ago. It was named ‘Shigir Idol’. The work dates from the ‘Mesolithic’, the middle of the Stone Age, which followed the Ice Age. This makes it twice as old as Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt. And also just slightly older than the famous temple stones in Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which must have been carved out about 11 thousand years ago. Birds and animals can be seen in those stones, such as wild boars, a buffalo and a fox.
A landmark four meters high
The four-meter-high Russian sculpture was found by gold prospectors in 1890, well preserved in peat at a depth of four meters, near the city of Kirovgrad. Recent ‘carbon dated’ scientific research established the true age of the sculpture. The tall sculpture represents a human and is vaguely reminiscent of a totem pole, the cultural form of the Native American tribes on the west coast of Canada. Researchers found no fewer than seven different faces in the sculpture. Could they have represented the spiritual world from that time? Did the sculpture stand in a central place where the gatherers and hunters of that time came together? Was it a landmark? Or a boundary post, to demarcate a territory?
What a shame that all older wooden sculptures have been lost throughout history. It could have told us so much more about the experiential world of those first humans or hominids on earth. Now the history of visual arts in Russia begins with figures carved from ivory, such as the ‘Venus of Kostenky’, which must have been made about 22 thousand years before Christ.
A wooden spear point from 420 thousand years ago
In other places in the world, much older cultural expressions were found. In caves in Madhya Pradesh, Central India, dome-shaped forms bear witness to this. These date back to as much as 700 thousand years before Christ. The ‘Venus of Berekhat Ram’, found in the Golan Hills between Syria and Israel, must have been formed from stone at least 230 thousand years before Christ – but it could also easily be hundreds of thousands of years older. In that case, this symbol of fertility was not made by ‘our’ human species ‘Homo sapiens’, but by extinct predecessors, such as ‘Homo habilis’ who also made stone tools in South Africa.
Would these first hominids have decorated the wooden handles of their primitive stone axes with a figurine or symmetrical figures, as in the ‘ribcage’ of the ‘Shigir Idol’? What is certain is that they carved spears to go hunting with. The oldest wooden spear point is the 420 thousand year old ‘Clacton Spear’, found in Clacton-on-Sea in the east of England. The makers of this were also early predecessors of us, the ‘Homo heidelbergensis’. They were already smart enough to hold the tip of the spear in the fire to then sharpen it more easily and quickly. That was necessary too, in case they encountered a cave bear or a cave lion.
A nice story about the Shigir Idol can be read in the New York Times.
