ARCHAEOLOGY Winter 2021

1. WASHINGTON, DC.- Some 9,000 years ago, corn as it is known today did not exist. Ancient peoples in southwestern Mexico encountered a wild grass called teosinte that offered ears smaller than a pinky finger with just a handful of stony kernels. But by stroke of genius or necessity, these Indigenous cultivators saw potential in the grain, adding it to their diets and putting it on a path to become a domesticated crop that now feeds billions.

Despite how vital corn, or maize, is to modern life, holes remain in the understanding of its journey through space and time. Now, a team co-led by Smithsonian researchers have used ancient DNA to fill in a few of those gaps.

A new study, which reveals details of corn’s 9,000-year history, is a prime example of the ways that basic research into ancient DNA can yield insights into human history that would otherwise be inaccessible, said co-lead author Logan Kistler, curator of archaeogenomics and archaeobotany at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

“Domestication—the evolution of wild plants over thousands of years into the crops that feed us today—is arguably the most significant process in human history, and maize is one of the most important crops currently grown on the planet,” Kistler said. “Understanding more about the evolutionary and cultural context of domestication can give us valuable information about this food we rely on so completely and its role in shaping civilization as we know it.”

In the Dec. 14 issue of the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kistler and an international team of collaborators report the fully sequenced genomes of three roughly 2,000-year-old cobs from the El Gigante rock shelter in Honduras. Analysis of the three genomes reveals that these millennia-old varieties of Central American corn had South American ancestry and adds a new chapter in an emerging complex story of corn’s domestication history.

“We show that humans were carrying maize from South America back towards the domestication center in Mexico,” Kistler said. “This would have provided an infusion of genetic diversity that may have added resilience or increased productivity. It also underscores that the process of domestication and crop improvement doesn’t just travel in a straight line.”

Humans first started selectively breeding corn’s wild ancestor teosinte around 9,000 years ago in Mexico, but partially domesticated varieties of the crop did not reach the rest of Central and South America for another 1,500 and 2,000 years, respectively.

For many years, conventional thinking among scholars had been that corn was first fully domesticated in Mexico and then spread elsewhere. However, after 5,000-year-old cobs found in Mexico turned out to only be partially domesticated, scholars began to reconsider whether this thinking captured the full story of corn’s domestication.

Then, in a landmark 2018 study led by Kistler, scientists used ancient DNA to show that while teosinte’s first steps toward domestication occurred in Mexico, the process had not yet been completed when people first began carrying it south to Central and South America. In each of these three regions, the process of domestication and crop improvement moved in parallel but at different speeds.

In an earlier effort to hone in on the details of this richer and more complex domestication story, a team of scientists including Kistler found that 4,300-year-old corn remnants from the Central American El Gigante rock shelter site had come from a fully domesticated and highly productive variety.

Surprised to find fully domesticated corn at El Gigante coexisting in a region not far from where partially domesticated corn had been discovered in Mexico, Kistler and project co-lead Douglas Kennett, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, teamed up to genetically determine where the El Gigante corn originated.

“El Gigante rock shelter is remarkable because it contains well-preserved plant remains spanning the last 11,000 years,” Kennett said. “Over 10,000 maize remains, from whole cobs to fragmentary stalks and leaves, have been identified. Many of these remains date late in time, but through an extensive radiocarbon study, we were able to identify some remains dating to as early as 4,300 years ago.”

They searched the archaeological strata surrounding the El Gigante rock shelter for cobs, kernels or anything else that might yield genetic material, and the team started working toward sequencing some of the site’s 4,300-year-old corn samples—the oldest traces of the crop at El Gigante.

Over two years, the team attempted to sequence 30 samples, but only three were of suitable quality to sequence a full genome. The three viable samples all came from the more recent layer of the rock shelter’s occupation—carbon dated between 2,300 and 1,900 years ago.

With the three sequenced genomes of corn from El Gigante, the researchers analyzed them against a panel of 121 published genomes of various corn varieties, including 12 derived from ancient corn cobs and seeds. The comparison revealed snippets of genetic overlap between the three samples from the Honduran rock shelter and corn varieties from South America.

“The genetic link to South America was subtle but consistent,” Kistler said. “We repeated the analysis many times using different methods and sample compositions but kept getting the same result.”

Kistler, Kennett and their co-authors at collaborating institutions, including Texas A&M University, Pennsylvania State University as well as the Francis Crick Institute and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, hypothesize that the reintroduction of these South American varieties to Central America may have jump-started the development of more productive hybrid varieties in the region.

Though the results only cover the El Gigante corn samples dated to around 2,000 years ago, Kistler said the shape and structure of the cobs from the roughly 4,000-year-old layer suggests they were nearly as productive as those he and his co-authors were able to sequence. To Kistler, this means the blockbuster crop improvement likely occurred before rather than during the intervening 2,000 years or so separating these archaeological layers at El Gigante. The team further hypothesizes that it was the introduction of the South American varieties of corn and their genes, likely at least 4,300 years ago, which may have increased the productivity of the region’s corn and the prevalence of corn in the diet of the people who lived in the broader region, as discovered in a recent study led by Kennett.

“We are starting to see a confluence of data from multiple studies in Central America indicating that maize was becoming a more productive staple crop of increasing dietary importance between 4,700 and 4,000 years ago,” Kennett said.

Taken together with Kennett’s recent study, these latest findings suggest that something momentous may have occurred in the domestication of corn about 4,000 years ago in Central America, and that an injection of genetic diversity from South America may have had something to do with it. This proposed timing also lines up with the appearance of the first settled agricultural communities in Mesoamerica that ultimately gave rise to great civilizations in the Americas, the Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan and the Aztec, though Kistler hastened to point out this idea is still relegated to speculation.

“We can’t wait to dig into the details of what exactly happened around the 4,000-year mark,” Kistler said. “There are so many archaeological samples of maize which haven’t been analyzed genetically. If we started testing more of these samples, we could start to answer these lingering questions about how important this reintroduction of South American varieties was.”

https://artdaily.cc/news/131442/Ancient-DNA-continues-to-rewrite-corn-s-9-000-year-society-shaping-history#.YGHxsq9KhGM

2. Rome ROME (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Wine turned white with crushed fava beans. A soupy concoction of snails, sheep and fish.

If these do not sound particularly appetizing today, they appear to have been all the rage in ancient Pompeii, as evidenced by ancient leftovers found during excavations this month at the archaeological site of the former Roman city. They were found in a thermopolium — or snack bar — serving street food popular in A.D. 79.

Two years after it was first partly unearthed, archaeologists began to excavate the interior of the shop this October. In December, they found food and drink residue that is expected to provide fresh clues about the ancient population’s culinary tastes.

The work offers “another insight into daily life at Pompeii” and represents the “first time an area of this type has been excavated in its entirety” and analyzed with modern technology, Massimo Osanna, the departing director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said Saturday.

Human life in Pompeii came to an abrupt halt nearly 2,000 years ago, when Mount Vesuvius spilled tons of lapilli, ash and rock onto the ancient Roman city, preserving it in time. Over the centuries, Pompeii became a powerful symbol of the transience of life.

Since excavations began in 1748, fragments of that ancient civilization have continued to emerge. About 80 thermopolii have been found at Pompeii, where residents could choose their edibles from containers set into street-front counters.

The one excavated this month included a large dolium, or earthenware vessel, that had contained wine.

The contents of two other jars remain to be analyzed, but Chiara Corbino, the archaeozoologist involved in the dig, said it appeared that they contained two kinds of dishes: a pork and fish combination found “in other contexts at Pompeii,” and a concoction involving snails, fish and sheep, perhaps a soup or stew.

“We will analyze the contents to determine the ingredients and better understand what kind of dish it was,” she said. For now, she thinks the thermopolium probably served a stew or soup that included “all these animals together.”

The documentary division of the national broadcaster Rai has followed the excavations at Pompeii over the past three years for a documentary that will be shown nationally Sunday and will be available to international audiences online.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

https://artdaily.cc/news/131472/Snail--fish-and-sheep-soup--anyone--Savory-new-finds-at-Pompeii#.YGHzMK9KhGM

3.. NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- When Dr. Juan Aviles went to school in Puerto Rico, teachers taught him that the original people of the island, the Taino, vanished soon after Spain colonized it. Violence, disease and forced labor wiped them out, destroying their culture and language, the teachers said, and the colonizers repopulated the island with slaves, including Indigenous people from Central and South America and Africans.

But at home, Aviles heard another story. His grandmother would tell him that they were descended from Taino ancestors and that some of the words they used also descended from the Taino language.

“But, you know, my grandmother had to drop out of school at second grade, so I didn’t trust her initially,” said Aviles, now a physician in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Aviles, who studied genetics in graduate school, has become active in using it to help connect people in the Caribbean with their genealogical history. And recent research in the field has led him to recognize that his grandmother was onto something.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, for example, shows that, on average, about 14% of people’s ancestry in Puerto Rico can be traced back to the Taino. In Cuba it is about 4% while in the Dominican Republic it is more like 6%.

These results, and others like them based on DNA found in ancient Caribbean skeletons, are providing insights into the region. They show, for example, that the Caribbean islands were populated in two distinct waves and that the human population of the islands was also smaller than once believed. But those living on the islands before colonial contact were not fully extinguished; millions of people living today inherited their DNA, along with traces of their traditions and languages.

Before the advent of Caribbean genetic studies, archaeologists provided most of the clues about the origins of people in the region. The first human residents of the Caribbean appear to have lived mostly as hunter-gatherers, catching game on the islands and fishing at sea while also maintaining small gardens.

Archaeologists have discovered a few burials of those ancient people. Starting in the early 2000s, geneticists managed to fish out a few bits of preserved DNA in their bones. Significant advances in recent years have made it possible to pull entire genomes from ancient skeletons.

“We went from zero full genomes two years ago to over 200 now,” said Maria Nieves-Colón, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the new study.

The genes of the oldest known residents of the Caribbean link them with the earliest populations that settled in Central and South America.

“It’s a Native American population, of course, but it’s a very distinctive deep lineage,” said David Reich, an author of the study and a geneticist at Harvard Medical School.

But it’s not yet clear exactly from where on the mainland those early Indigenous Americans set sail in dugout canoes to reach the Caribbean islands.

“I don’t think we’re as close as we thought we’d be to an answer,” said Nieves-Colón, an author of another large-scale genetic study in July.

Part of the problem is that scientists have yet to find ancient DNA in the Caribbean that is more than 3,000 years old. “There’s a lot we can’t see because we don’t have old DNA,” Nieves-Colón said.

About 2,500 years ago, the archaeological record shows, there was a drastic shift in the cultural life of the Caribbean. People started living in bigger settlements, intensively farming crops like maize and sweet potatoes. Their pottery became more sophisticated and elaborate. For archaeologists, the change indicates the end of what they call the Archaic Age and the start of a Ceramic Age.

Nieves-Colón and other researchers have found that the DNA of Caribbean islanders also shifted at the same time. The skeletons from the Ceramic Age largely shared a new genetic signature. Their DNA links them to small tribes still living today in Colombia and Venezuela.

It’s possible that the migrants from the Caribbean coast of South America brought with them the languages that were still being spoken when Columbus arrived 2,000 years later. We don’t know a lot about these languages, although some words have managed to survive. The word hurricane, for example, comes from hurakán, the Taino name for the god of storms.

These words bear a striking resemblance to words from a family of languages in South America called Arawak. The DNA of the Ceramic Age Caribbeans most closely resembles that of living Arawak speakers.

In the Ceramic Age record, it becomes hard to find people with much Archaic ancestry. They seem to have survived in a few places, like western Cuba, until they vanished about 1,000 years ago. The people bearing Ceramic Age ancestry came to dominate the Caribbean, with almost no interbreeding between the two groups.

“It seems like the Archaics were just overwhelmed by the Ceramics,” said William Keegan, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History and an author of the new study.

Keegan, who has been studying Caribbean archaeology for over three decades, said the new DNA findings had surprised him in many ways, giving him a host of new questions to investigate.

Over the course of the Ceramic Age, for example, strikingly new pottery styles emerged every few centuries. Researchers have long guessed that those shifts reflect the arrival of new groups of people in the islands. The ancient DNA doesn’t support that idea, though. There’s a genetic continuity through those drastic cultural changes. It appears that the same group of people in the Caribbean went through a series of major social changes that archaeologists have yet to explain.

Reich and his fellow geneticists also discovered family ties that spanned the Caribbean during the Ceramic Age. They found 19 pairs of people on different islands who shared identical segments of DNA — a sign that they were fairly close relatives. In one case, they found long-distance cousins from the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, separated by over 800 miles.

That finding flies in the face of influential theories from archaeology.

“The original idea was that people start in one place, they establish a colony someplace else, and then they just cut all ties to where they came from,” Keegan said. “But the genetic evidence is suggesting that these ties were maintained over a long period of time.”

Rather than being made up of isolated communities, in other words, the Caribbean was a busy, long-distance network that people regularly traveled by dugout canoe. “The water is like a highway,” Nieves-Colón said.

The genetic variations also allowed Reich and his colleagues to estimate the size of the Caribbean society before European contact. Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomew sent letters back to Spain putting the figure in the millions. The DNA suggests that was an exaggeration: the genetic variations imply that the total population was as low as the tens of thousands.

Colonization delivered a huge shock to the Caribbean world, greatly changing its genetic profile. But the Ceramic Age people still managed to pass on their genes to future generations. And now, with a population of about 44 million people, the Caribbean may contain more Taino DNA than it did in 1491.

“Now we have this evidence to show that we weren’t extinct, we just mixed, and we’re still around,” Aviles said.

His fascination with the research on Caribbean DNA led him recently to help found the Council of Native Caribbean Heritage. The organization helps people find their own links to the Caribbean’s distant past. Aviles and his colleagues have consulted with Reich and other researchers, both to discuss the direction of the research and to use it to understand their own histories.

Aviles and his colleagues have uploaded the ancient Caribbean genomes to a genealogical database called GEDMatch. With the help of genealogists, people can compare their own DNA to the ancient genomes. They can see the matching stretches of genetic material that reveal their relatedness.

Sometimes Aviles imagines explaining all this to his late grandmother. “But first I would apologize for not believing her,” he said, “because she was spot on.”

https://artdaily.cc/news/131602/Ancient-DNA-shows-humans-settled-Caribbean-in-2-distinct-waves#.YGH68q9KhGM

© 2020 The New York Times Company

4. WASHINGTON (AFP).- Archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest known cave painting: a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was made at least 45,500 years ago in Indonesia.

The finding described in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday provides the earliest evidence of human settlement of the region.

Co-author Maxime Aubert of Australia's Griffith University told AFP it was found on the island of Sulawesi in 2017 by doctoral student Basran Burhan, as part of surveys the team was carrying out with Indonesian authorities.

The Leang Tedongnge cave is located in a remote valley enclosed by sheer limestone cliffs, about an hour's walk from the nearest road.

It is only accessible during the dry season because of flooding during the wet season -- and members of the isolated Bugis community told the team it had never before been seen by Westerners.

Measuring 136 by 54 centimeters (53 by 21 inches) the Sulawesi warty pig was painted using dark red ochre pigment and has a short crest of upright hair, as well as a pair of horn-like facial warts characteristic of adult males of the species.

There are two hand prints above the pig's hindquarters, and it appears to be facing two other pigs that are only partially preserved, as part of a narrative scene.

"The pig appears to be observing a fight or social interaction between two other warty pigs," said co-author Adam Brumm.

Humans have hunted Sulawesi warty pigs for tens of thousands of years, and they are a key feature of the region's prehistoric artwork, particularly during the Ice Age.

Early human migration

Aubert, a dating specialist, identified a calcite deposit that had formed on top of the painting, then used Uranium-series isotope dating to confidently say the deposit was 45,500 years old.

This makes the painting at least that age, "but it could be much older because the dating that we're using only dates the calcite on top of it," he explained.

"The people who made it were fully modern, they were just like us, they had all of the capacity and the tools to do any painting that they liked," he added.

The previously oldest dated rock art painting was found by the same team in Sulawesi. It depicted a group of part-human, part-animal figures hunting mammals, and was found to be at least 43,900 years old.

Cave paintings such as these also help fill in gaps about our understanding of early human migrations.

It's known that people reached Australia 65,000 years ago, but they would probably have had to cross the islands of Indonesia, known as "Wallacea."

This site now represents the oldest evidence of humans in Wallacea, but it's hoped further research will help show people were in the region much earlier, which would resolve the Australia settlement puzzle.

The team believes the artwork was made by Homo sapiens, as opposed to now extinct human species like Denisovans, but cannot say this for certain.

To make handprints, the artists would have had to place their hands on a surface then spit pigment over it, and the team are hoping to try to extract DNA samples from residual saliva.

© Agence France-Presse

https://artdaily.cc/news/132045/World-s-oldest-known-cave-painting-found-in-Indonesia#.YGIHHK9KhGM

5. NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- The world’s oldest known wooden sculpture — a 9-foot-tall totem pole thousands of years old — looms over a hushed chamber of an obscure Russian museum in the Ural Mountains, not far from the Siberian border. As mysterious as the huge stone figures of Easter Island, the Shigir Idol, as it is called, is a landscape of uneasy spirits that baffles the modern onlooker.

Dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in 1890, the relic, or what’s left of it, is carved from a great slab of freshly cut larch. Scattered among the geometric patterns (zigzags, chevrons, herringbones) are eight human faces, each with slashes for eyes that peer not so benignly from the front and back planes.

The topmost mouth, set in a head shaped like an inverted teardrop, is wide open and slightly unnerving. “The face at the very top is not a passive one,” said Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, in Germany. “Whether it screams or shouts or sings, it projects authority, possibly malevolent authority. It’s not immediately a friend of yours, much less an ancient friend of yours.”

In archaeology, portable prehistoric sculpture is called “mobiliary art.” With the miraculous exception of the Shigir Idol, no Stone Age wood carvings survive. The statue’s age was a matter of conjecture until 1997, when it was carbon-dated by Russian scientists to about 9,500 years old, an age that struck most scholars as fanciful. Skeptics argued that the statue’s complex iconography was beyond the reach of the hunter-gatherer societies at the time; unlike contemporaneous works from Europe and Asia featuring straightforward depictions of animals and hunt scenes, the Shigir Idol is decorated with symbols and abstractions.

In 2014, Terberger and a team of German and Russian scientists tested samples from the idol’s core — uncontaminated by previous efforts to conserve the wood — using accelerator mass spectrometry. The more advanced technology yielded a remarkably early origin: roughly 11,600 years ago, a time when Eurasia was still transitioning out of the last ice age. The statue was more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, as well as, by many millenniums, the first known work of ritual art.

A new study that Terberger wrote with some of the same colleagues in Quaternary International, further skews our understanding of prehistory by pushing back the original date of the Shigir Idol by an additional 900 years, placing it in the context of the early art in Eurasia.

“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” Terberger said. “The landscape changed, and the art — figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock — did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”

Written with an eye toward disentangling Western science from colonialism, Terberger’s latest paper 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.

“Ever since the Victorian era, Western science has been a story of superior European knowledge and the cognitively and behaviorally inferior ‘other,’ ” Terberger said. “The hunter-gatherers are regarded as inferior to early agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the same time, the archaeological evidence from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and neglected. For many of my colleagues, the Urals were a very terra incognita.”

To João Zilhão, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Barcelona who was not involved in the study, the take-home message of the research is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

“It’s similar to the ‘Neanderthals did not make art’ fable, which was entirely based on absence of evidence,” he said. “And then the evidence was found and the fable exposed for what it was. Likewise, the overwhelming scientific consensus used to hold that modern humans were superior in key ways, including their ability to innovate, communicate and adapt to different environments. Nonsense, all of it.”

Zilhão said the Shigir Idol findings revealed the extent to which preservation biases affect our understanding of Paleolithic art. “Most of the art must have been made of wood and other perishables,” he said. “Which makes it clear that arguments about the wealth of mobiliary art in, say, the Upper Paleolithic of Germany or France by comparison to southern Europe, are largely nonsensical and an artifact of tundra (where there are no trees and you use ivory, which is archaeologically visible) versus open forest environments (where you’d use wood, which is archaeologically invisible).”

Olaf Jöris, of the Leibniz Research Institute for Archaeology, agreed. “The new Shigir evidence makes archaeologists daydream of how the archaeological record may have looked if wooden remains had been preserved in greater abundance,” he said.

The Shigir Idol, named for the bog near Kirovgrad in which it was found, is presumed to have rested on a rock base for perhaps two or three decades before toppling into a long-gone paleo-lake, where the peat’s antimicrobial properties protected it like a time capsule. In the mid-19th century, gold was discovered beneath the mire, and the landowner, Count Alexey Stenbok-Fermor, hired laborers to mine the open-air site for ore. He instructed them to save any other objects they unearthed.

Thirteen feet down the idol was discovered, and retrieved in 10 fragments. The pieces were carted 60 miles to Yekaterinburg, the city where, 28 years later, the last czar of the Russian Empire, Emperor Nicholas II; his wife, Alexandra; and their children would be executed by the Bolsheviks. In Yekaterinburg, the count’s donation was displayed with bone arrowheads, slotted bone daggers, a polished elk antler and other ancient bog finds at the Urals Natural Sciences Society, today known as the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore.

The director of the museum allowed the railroad stationmaster, Dmitry Lobanov, an aspiring archaeologist, to assemble the main fragments into a 9-foot-tall figure with legs crossed tightly in a pose that potty-training parents of any epoch might recognize.

“It was not a scientific construction,” said the archaeologist Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a co-author of the new study. The idol stayed locked in that uncomfortable position until 1914, when archaeologist Vladimir Tolmachev suggested incorporating the remnants into the finished work — increasing its height to almost 17 1/2 feet. Much of the bottom half later went missing; Tolmachev’s sketches of the section are all that remain.

For more than a century, the Shigir Idol was considered a curiosity, assumed to be at most a few thousand years old. The radiocarbon analysis in 1997 was greeted with derision by some scientists who found the conclusions implausibly old. Some doubters even suggested that the statue was a forgery.

Terberger and his colleagues have settled that question in their new study, demonstrating conclusively that the larch was a literal tree of knowledge. The timber was at least 159 years old when the ancient carpenters began to shape it.

“The rings tell us that trees were growing very slowly, as the temperature was still quite cold,” Terberger said. Given the speed with which larch logs rot and warp, the researchers determined that the idol was fashioned from a tree that had just been cut. And from the widths and depths of the markings, Zhilin deduced that the cuts were made by at least three sharp chisels, two of which were probably polished stone adzes and the other possibly the lower jaw of a beaver, teeth intact. (On the subject of beaver mandibles, Terberger respectfully disagrees. “During the period of rapid cooling from about 10,700 B.C. to 9,600 B.C. that we call the Younger Dryas, no beavers should have been around in the Transurals,” he said.)

And what do the engravings mean?

Svetlana Savchenko, the artifact’s curator and an author on the study, speculates that the eight faces may well contain encrypted information about ancestor spirits, the boundary between earth and sky, or a creation myth. Although the monument is unique, Savchenko sees a resemblance to the stone sculptures of what has long been considered the world’s oldest temple, Gobekli Tepe, whose ruins are in present-day Turkey, some 1,550 miles away. The temple’s stones were carved around 11,000 years ago, which makes them 1,500 years younger than the Shigir Idol.

Marcel Niekus, an archaeologist with the Foundation for Stone Age Research in the Netherlands, said that the updated, older age of the Shigir Idol confirmed that it “represents a unique and unparalleled find in Europe. One could wonder how many similar pieces have been lost over time due to poor preservation conditions.”

The similarity of the geometric motifs to others across Europe in that era, he added, “is evidence of long-distance contacts and a shared sign language over vast areas. The sheer size of the idol also seems to indicate it was meant as a marker in the landscape that was supposed to be seen by other hunter-gatherer groups — perhaps marking the border of a territory, a warning or welcoming sign.”

Zhilin has spent much of the last 12 years investigating other peat bogs in the Urals. At one site he uncovered ample evidence of prehistoric carpentry — woodworking tools and a massive pine plank, roughly 11,300 years old, that he believes had been smoothed with an adze. “There are many more unexplored bogs in the mountains,” Zhilin said. Unfortunately, there are no ongoing excavations.

During a recent video conversation from his home in Moscow, Zhilin asked his interviewer in the United States: “What do you think is the hardest thing to find in the Stone Age archaeology of the Urals?”

A pause: Sites?

“No,” he said, sighing softly. “Funding.”

https://artdaily.cc/news/134135/How-the-world-s-oldest-wooden-sculpture-is-reshaping-prehistory#.YGI6gK9KhGM

© 2021 The New York Times Company