4,000-Year-Old 'Snake Staff' Discovered in Finland

Researchers have discovered a 4,400-year-old wooden staff shaped like a snake near a lake in southwest Finland. Archaeologists Satu Koivisto, Antti Lahelma and their research team discovered the carving beneath a layer of peat in Järvensuo, a late Stone Age site about 75 miles northwest of Helsinki. Experts used radiocarbon dating to determine that the 21-inch-long snake dates to the Neolithic period, about 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, and believe that an ancient shaman may have used the object for magical rituals. The team published their findings on June 29 in the journal Antiquity.

Scientists believe that Stone Age peoples occupied the area where the staff was located from 4000 B.C. to 2000 B.C., notes Jesse Holth for ARTnews. In the 1950s, a ditch digging team accidentally discovered the archaeological site, but experts didn’t fully excavate it. Then, in 2019, scholars started digs at Järvensuo for the first time in 35 years, writes George Dvorsky for Gizmodo. The wetland has yielded several well-preserved artifacts, including objects made from wood, bark and bone that date back thousands of years.

“There seems to be a certain connection between snakes and people,” says Lahelma, a study co-author and archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, in a statement, as quoted by National Geographic's Kristin Romey. “This brings to mind northern shamanism of the historical period, where snakes had a special role as spirit-helper animals of the shaman … Even though the time gap is immense, the possibility of some kind of continuity is tantalizing: Do we have a Stone Age shaman's staff?”

In 2019, archaeologists found a 1,500-year-old piece of fossilized human feces, which had the remains of a whole rattlesnake.
After analyzing the feces, experts determined that someone probably ate the animal for ritualistic reasons and not for nourishment.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/4000-year-old-snake-staff-discovered-finland-180978101/

According to ARTnews, craftsmen wrought the animal carving from a single piece of wood. The life-size snake has an open mouth and a long, slightly curved body, as if it's slithering or swimming away.