Mysterious Wooden Shigir Idol With 'Encrypted Message' Is 11,000 Years Old, New Tests Reveal

This is actually pretty amazing.


Mysterious Wooden Shigir Idol With 'Encrypted Message' Is 11,000 Years Old, New Tests Reveal

Quote :

The idol is more than twice as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza, 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.

Quote :

The new analysis found the sculpture to be 11,000 years old, and made from a larch that was 157 years old when it was felled by stone tools.

Pardon my skepticism at such exact figures.

I harbor no skepticism with the numbers. 157 years? Hell, count the rings in the wood. Simple.
11,000 years is not intended to be exact, just really close. If they had said 11,003 years, I would be skeptical.

What really irritates me about these matters is the way in which some so-called experts pretend to have knowledge, when all they are doing is making shit up. "Secret code"? I doubt it. And this bit, "...some anthropologists believe straight lines on the idol could represent the land, the horizon or the boundary between heaven and earth..." really pisses me off. Why must they attribute modern man's stupidity to ancients? Heaven? Really? Give me a break.

There would be no way to know the tree was 157 years old unless they had a complete cross-section of the tree, from center to bark.

Radio-carbon dating could not distinguish between 9,000 years old and 11,000 years old -- that is beyond its resolution.

Dating of the wood does not necessarily date the carving.

The whole article is scientifically illiterate bullshit.

They used Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, which can be as accurate as 0.2%.

Bite me. It's more important to be sure than right.