This Wooden Sculpture Is Twice as Old as Stonehenge and the Pyramids

smithsonianmag.com ^ | MARCH 24, 2021 | Nora McGreevy

[Adder]

Look like Polynesian salad forks

[Alas Babylon!]

Not really.

Think of the Great Plains 200 years ago, teaming with great herds of buffalo, deer and pronghorn, or East Africa 100 years ago, teaming with wilderbeest, zebras, impalas and Cape buffalo.

In both cases, open grasslands came with huge herds of grass eaters.

These people—probably the early Indo-Europeans—hunted vast herds of reindeer, mammoth, bison, and horses on the tundra prairie.

The tundra grasslands turning back into forest would have decimated those herds.

[gnarledmaw]

It is. Its from the time before they migrated. They were much bigger back then.

[TigersEye]

Just when things were getting nice they suddenly got bad about 12,800 years ago ...

[DannyTN]

Slender Man!!!

[BenLurkin]

Yes, indeed.

Could also be an awesome back scrather.

[miliantnutcase]

Solar minimum

[TigersEye]

Comet fragments.

[Salamander]

Ur-Celts.

Calling it.

:D

[Salamander]

In the park.
[I think it was the fourth of July]

[knarf]

“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 tells Franz Lidz of the New York Times. “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.”

Did I misunderstand ?

[21twelve]

“A longer, more fruitful growing season was “challenging” ?”

Well sure, if all you know how to feed yourself is scavenging and hunting under certain conditions. BUT - the climate changes would have been fairly slow I would think that one could adapt.

Although perhaps not. The Vikings in Greenland left after years of cold weather ruined their crops (they were farmers by then). The natives offered to take them on fishing and seal trips. But the natives would hold their rituals ahead of the hunts, and the Vikings (also now Christian!) wouldn’t partake in their pagan worship.

Adapt or die. Or at least move.

[knarf]

I perceive this article’s verbiage to indicator the carvings are some kind of worship or “thank you” to the gods (or whatever) for life becoming pleasant

[alexander_busek]

Could also be an awesome back scrather.

You scrath my back, and I'll scrath yours.

Regards,

[wardaddy]

Tribal Wood

(Puns unlimited)

[21twelve]

That would make sense. Hard to devote too much time to “art” when you are facing hardships just trying to survive.

[FlingWingFlyer]

You’re right! It IS Johnny Kerry “Reporting for Dooty”.

[Hardastarboard]

LOL!! It has his chin and mouth, doesn’t it?

[Does so]

There’s only so much you can carve into a 2x6.

;)

[Deaf Smith]

A man selling crystal meth

Screaming Italian slurs