Mal'ta Figurines: Ice Age Ivory Art of Siberia Near Lake Baikal

The Mal’ta figurines are a group of small carved ivory statuettes found at Mal’ta, an Upper Palaeolithic settlement on the Belaya River west of Lake Baikal in Siberia. Made around 24,000 years ago, they are among the earliest known works of art from northern Asia. Together with carved birds, dwellings and a remarkable child burial, they show that people lived and made art in Siberia close to the coldest phase of the last Ice Age.

Discovery and excavation

The site lies by the village of Mal’ta in Irkutsk Oblast, roughly 80–90 kilometres north-west of the city of Irkutsk. In 1928 a villager digging a cellar found animal bones and worked objects, and word reached archaeologists in Irkutsk. The young researcher Mikhail Gerasimov began excavating that same year.

Gerasimov worked at Mal’ta for several seasons up to the early 1930s and returned in the 1950s. He uncovered thousands of stone tools, bone and ivory objects and the remains of houses. Later fieldwork by other Russian teams continued into the 1990s and 2000s.

A closely related site, Buret’, was found on the Angara River in 1936 and excavated by Aleksei Okladnikov. Archaeologists often group the two as the Mal’ta–Buret’ culture.

The female figurines

The best-known finds are some 30 female figurines carved from mammoth ivory, according to commonly cited counts. Most are only a few centimetres tall. Unlike the rounded “Venus” figures of Europe, many are slender, with narrow bodies and carefully worked faces.

Several figurines carry incised patterns over the body and head. Many researchers read these as fur clothing with hoods, which would make them among the earliest depictions of tailored garments. A few figures were drilled with holes, suggesting they were hung or worn as pendants.

Recent studies have questioned whether all the figures show adult women. Some researchers argue that certain pieces depict children or have no clear sex, so the old label “Venus figurines” may hide real variety.

Birds, ornaments and other art

Mal’ta also produced small ivory carvings of flying birds, usually identified as swans, geese or ducks. Their outstretched necks and folded wings make them easy to recognise. Some were pierced and may also have been worn.

Other finds include ivory beads, bracelets and diadems, and an ivory plaque decorated with a spiral of small pits on one side and wavy lines on the other. These works show a rich decorative tradition that has few close parallels elsewhere in Siberia.

Houses on the Ice Age steppe

Gerasimov identified the remains of several dwellings. They were partly sunk into the ground and built with large animal bones, reindeer antlers and stone slabs, probably supporting a covering of hides.

Hearths and concentrations of tools inside the houses suggest that people stayed for long periods, perhaps through the cold season. Animal bones show that reindeer were a key prey species, alongside other Ice Age animals such as woolly rhinoceros and mammoth, although mammoth ivory and bones could also be collected from carcasses.

The Mal’ta boy and ancient DNA

One of Gerasimov’s most important finds was the burial of a child aged about three or four, laid out with an ivory diadem, a necklace of beads and a bird figurine. For decades the grave was mainly of interest to archaeologists.

In 2014 a team led by Maanasa Raghavan and Eske Willerslev published the genome of this child, known as MA-1 or the Mal’ta boy. His DNA was related both to later western Eurasians and to Native Americans. Geneticists estimate that something like a third of Native American ancestry traces back to this “Ancient North Eurasian” population, with published figures ranging roughly from 14 to 38 per cent.

The result helped explain the people who later crossed Beringia during the peopling of the Americas. It also showed that populations in Ice Age Siberia were connected to groups far to the west.

Gerasimov and the wider picture

Mikhail Gerasimov (1907–1970) began his career in Irkutsk and later became famous in Moscow for reconstructing the faces of historical figures from their skulls. His work at Mal’ta, carried out when he was barely in his twenties, made the site a reference point for Soviet Palaeolithic research.

Mal’ta and Buret’ remain unusual. Few other Siberian sites of similar age have produced comparable figurines, so the Mal’ta–Buret’ tradition is sometimes seen as a local flowering of art. Some scholars have compared its figurines with those of central and eastern Europe, while others stress how different they are.

Timeline

• c. 24,000 years ago: Main occupation of the Mal’ta settlement, by calibrated radiocarbon dates.
• 1928: A villager’s cellar digging exposes finds; Mikhail Gerasimov begins excavations.
• 1928–early 1930s: Gerasimov uncovers dwellings, figurines, bird carvings and the child burial.
• 1936: The related Buret’ site is discovered on the Angara River and excavated by Aleksei Okladnikov.
• 1950s: Gerasimov returns to Mal’ta for further excavation.
• 2014: The genome of the Mal’ta boy is published, revealing links with Native Americans.

Why it matters

Mal’ta shows that Ice Age people in Siberia produced art as sophisticated as that of Europe, from the Venus of Willendorf tradition to the bird carvings unique to this region. Its figurines offer rare glimpses of clothing in a frozen world, and the burial of a small boy has become a key to understanding how humans spread from Asia into the Americas.