Shigir, Myserious Russian Statue, Is World's Oldest Wooden Sculpture Monument

One mysterious wooden statue retrieved from a Russian peat bog, in the Ural Mountains, 1890, is twice as old as Stonehenge and the pyramids. The Shigir idol is thus 11,000 years old, not 9,500 years old. It is thus the oldest wooden sculpture in the world, according to The Independent.

These facts were revealed at press conference on August 27 in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

"We can say the results are sensational," said a source at Sverdlovsk Regional History Museum, where the awesome monument is on exhibition.

"Researches were conducted in Mannheim, Germany, at one of the world's most advanced laboratories using Accelerated Mass Spectrometry, on seven minuscule wooden samples. The results were astonishing, as samples from inside parts of the Idol showed its age as 11,000 calendar years, to the very beginning of the Holocene epoch. We also learned that the sculpture was made from a larch which was at least 157 years old," researchers said at the press conference, according to The Siberian Times.

It is quite a tall idol, at 9.2 feet height, even though it was once double that at 17.4 feet. The Soviet era destroyed some parts of the idol.

Another problem is that the idol has an "encrypted code" on it from a lost civilization.

"The ornament is covered with nothing but encrypted information. People were passing on knowledge with the help of the Idol," Professor Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Archaeology, said.

Experts are excited about the code, hoping that it contains a belief system, like the Bible's Genesis, which would help them to discover more about the "development of civilization and the art of Eurasia and humanity as a whole."

"This is a masterpiece, carrying gigantic emotional value and force," Zhilin concluded. "It is a unique sculpture, there is nothing else in the world like this," he added, according to hngn.