Wooden Statue Found in Late 1890s Likely Dates Back More Than 11,000 Years
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
WP says Larch is 'waterproof' and 'resistant to rot when in contact with the ground'. And it's a conifer that loses its needles in the fall. Now consider that it can grow as far north as 'the tundra and polar ice' and is 'very long-lived'.
Consider that the outside was dated at 9800ya in the 1990s, but in 2014 the core (the oldest part of any tree) dates to 11,600.
Here in the US, the glaciers were done melting to about 45N by 9000 ya. (Yekaterinburg is at 56N, so maybe more like 7500ya?).
Just for fun, suppose that the wood had been stuck in a glacier for a very long time, say 2000 years. When the carver found it. Are there any C14-dating/Russian glaciologist folk here to explain those two sample dates? Could it have been in a glacier longer than 2000 years?
The russian article on Wikipedia says that there was a research including examining the surface with a microscope and it shows that the statue is made from a freshly chopped tree with stone tools.
The difference is dates is because the research in 2015 was done using another method [1] . The age of the tree is estimated to be around 160 years old.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-04-wooden-shigir-idol-egyptian-py...
If the dates are right it's amazing that this marks that time -and- is a spectacular cultural marker. Can't help but think of totem poles.
The science has to be done right. Groundwater can contain 'aged carbon', low in C-14, derived from rocks through which it has passed. Things soaked in it can look -much- older than they are.
Szukalski had some crack-pot ideas (Zermatism, Protong), but the idea that humans hadn't gotten quite the right perspective on ancient art is one of his most endearing claims.
(* - https://www.amazon.com/Behold-Protong-Robert-Williams/dp/086... - a fascinating book, if only for the art lover who wants a perspective not usually proferred by the mainstream..)
There are mythical accounts verbally communicated for geological events like mega eruptiona spanning tens of thousand years.
I'd speculate that since language skills are important, evolution would have worked to increase them over that era.
That is a meaningless statement, when there is no consensus on the fundamentals of language, and more so because the Languages of the world differ variously.
I'm not sure what you think how complexity of language is measured. Certainly, there are terms and expressions that had to be invented along with the concepts that they describe, which hunter gatherers don't know, and that's not limited to technology. Emotional content would be much more important on a human scale. I think the question would have to be, whether everyone was able to speak. Which term would the analogous to "literate"?
The only way I can think of for measuring the complexity of a language is an inaccurate empirical one: see how hard it is for speakers of unrelated languages to learn it. That approach would probably confirm that Hausa is harder to learn than Bahasa Indonesia, for example, though whether that's what other people mean by "complexity", I can't say.
See, thats the fascinating thing about crackpot archeology/anthropology/sociology/etc. Eventually, its just a bunch of words - an ontology - with which to describe a complex system.
The idea that the root nature of the language is expressible in human-ideal objects, and that this ontology can persist across 10's of thousands of years of human activity (mostly destructive) as a cultural artifact with a message .. yes, this is difficult to conceive. Or, is it really?
"Far-fetched empires": literally what it means to consider what such an empire, were it in existence 65,000 years ago, would have looked like. Like, literally, its a far-fetched idea to look at a piece of dirt, and then paint a deep picture of what happened to it.
Without such imagination, speculation doesn't begin, and without speculation followed up by careful inspection, the relics would still just be out there, being ignored.
What's noteworthy here is intent. I think ;)
Borrowing a technique from Carl Sagan's Contact where Arroway and Hadden interpreted the Vega message, I then thought like I was from Planet X. The meaning of these three sections became obvious in higher dimensions...
"I am Groot"