Shigir Idol, an wooden statue with mysterious encrypted message, is 11,000 years old

The mysterious wooden statue Shigir Idol has been found to be 11,000 years old, or 1,500 years older than previously believed, according to new tests, making it the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world, reports The Huffington Post quoting The Siberian Times.

The idol is more than twice as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, three times older than the ancient city of Babylon, and five times as old as Al Khazneh, the most famous of the ruins in the ancient city of Petra in Jordan.

Radiocarbon dating conducted over the statue in 1997 found it to be 9,500 years old, but the results were controversial. Seven "minuscule" samples of wood from the statue were sent to Germany to be analysed by accelerated mass spectrometry to confirm its age.

The new tests found the sculpture to be 11,000 years old, and also that it was made from a 157-year-old larch that was struck down using stone tools.

"This confirms that hunters and fishermen from Urals created works of art as developed and as monumental as ancient farmers of the Middle East," the website quoted the museum as saying.

The nine feet long wooden idol was found in a bog in the Urals in western Siberia during the late 19th century. The wood was well preserved in the conditions in the bog, making its carved face still very much visible along with a series of lines, squiggles and other marks that run along the length of the sculpture.

The Shigir Idol was originally even taller, perhaps more than 17 feet high, but some of its pieces have been lost over the years.

Archaeologist Vladimir Tolmachev's sketches, made over a century ago, depicted a more complete version of the idol.

Besides the face at the top, several other faces are visible at various points along the statue.

There are a number of theories about what the faces or the lines and markings signify, however, it is still not clear.

"This is a masterpiece, carrying gigantic emotional value and force, a unique sculpture; there is nothing else in the world like this," Professor Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Archaeology told the Siberian Times last year.

"It is very alive, and very complicated at the same time," he also said, adding that the markings are "nothing but encrypted information."

"People were passing on knowledge with the help of the idol," he further said, calling it "an utter mystery to modern man."

Some anthropologists believed that the straight lines on the idol could represent the land, the horizon or the boundary between heaven and earth, while a wavy line could mean water, a snake or a lizard, and a zigzag could indicate danger, Itogi News reported in 2007.

The idol was called "one of the greatest sculptures of the late Stone Age" by The Encyclopedia of Stone Age Art, which also said that further research may determine "whether the signs represented a set of pictorial instructions, like a map."

"Although all commentators refer to its exceptional height, and its enigmatic geometric symbols, no one seems to have mentioned the possibility that it may be an early prototype of the totem pole, popularized by North American Indians who also originated in Siberia," The Encyclopedia also said, mentioning another possibility.

The Shigir Idol is on display at the Sverdlovsk Regional History Museum at present.