Shigir Idol
Shigir Idol - the oldest really-old-thing out there (Wikipedia/Uploaded by Фальшивомонетчик)
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A while back (1894 - okay, quite a while back), archeologists found this cool wooden column in a peat bog in the Ural mountains, and they saw immediately that it was old. I mean, really old. They eventually stopped standing around saying, "That looks really old", and did some science on it to determine it was 9,500 years old.

New sciencey stuff actually shows that it's much older. It's really 11,000 years old!

This makes it more than twice as old as the oldest stuff we've been happy with up to now. The pyramids? Meh, about 5,000. Stonehenge? A measly 4,600! Gertrude Weaver? She's only 116! Pfft, amateur.

The Shigir Idol is an 11,000-year-old wooden column, carved with words and symbols! It was carved from a larch (hehe Monty Python, anyone?), and stood about 17 feet tall, but of course the Russians lost parts of it. Heck, they couldn't keep track of their nukes, you expect them to watch an old log better?

Luckily, an archeologist drew some sketches of the whole carving before those careless Russians lost about half of it. The drawings show seven crazy-ass faces carved in the column, and the top one is a full-on 3D head.

The science people think it was a religious or spiritual thing. But then again, they always say that, as if people in the distant past just sat around worshipping stuff. It's probably some kind of sex thing, since it's been discovered that all our ancestors were freaking pervs. Ladies, it's not just your guy who's a perv, we've been pervs since the dawn of time.

Just because it said larch in the story:

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