World’s Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Far More Ancient Than We’d Thought — 12,500 Years

That’s more than twice as old as Stonehenge and the Giza Pyramids and by far the oldest surviving piece of ritual art. The new dating means that the Shigir Idol, as it’s called, dug up from a peat bog in the Urals in 1890, “challenges the ethnocentric notion that pretty much everything, including symbolic expression and philosophical perceptions of the world, came to Europe by way of the sedentary farming communities in the Fertile Crescent 8,000 years ago.” – The New York Times