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      Settlement of Siberia

      Siberia is part of the Asian territory of Russia from the Urals in the west to the mountain ranges of the Pacific watershed in the east and from the shores of the Arctic Ocean in the north to the elevated steppes of Kazakhstan and the border with Mongolia in the south. The relief of Siberia is very diverse. Within its limits, 4 large geomorphological regions are clearly distinguished: the West Siberian Lowland, the Middle Siberian Plateau, the mountains of Southern Siberia and the mountain system of the northeast (Verkhoyansk-Kolyma Region).

      The first traces of human presence in Siberia date back to the Stone Age. The sites of primitive man of the Upper Paleolithic era were discovered on the rivers: Ob, Angara, Yenisei, near Irkutsk, in Transbaikalia. Archaeological research on the Angara and Yenisei showed that a person with a culture very close to the Upper Paleolithic culture of the Russian Plain penetrated into these remote eastern regions at the end of the Solutrean and at the beginning of the Madeleine time. The earliest of the monuments of this kind is a settlement found in the city of Irkutsk, where, along with the bones of rhinoceros, reindeer and other animals of the Quaternary period, ornamented products from mammoth tusks, as well as bone and stone tools, including pointy points, resembling, judging by the description, Solutrean pointy points of Europe, were found. The finds in Bureti, on the Angara River, and in the village of Malta on the Belaya River, a tributary of the Angara, where the remains of typical Upper Paleolithic settlements were discovered, in which hunters of mammoth, rhinoceros, reindeer, wild horses and bulls lived, belong to a somewhat later, Solutreian-Madeleine time. One of the Paleolithic dwellings found in Bureti had the appearance of a straight square with slightly rounded corners. Along the edges of the dwelling, directly above the recess of the floor, the mammoth femurs were vertically dug in. For greater stability, they were wedged in the pits with other bones and limestone tiles. These bones served as pillars or abutments for the roof of the dwelling. A narrow passage led out of the dwelling, also furnished at the edges with symmetrically arranged mammoth femurs. Inside there was a hearth, preserved in the form of a continuous accumulation of ash mass. The roof of the dwelling was made of reindeer antlers. Similar dwellings existed in the neighboring Maltese parking lot on the Belaya River.

      Judging by the surviving remains, the dwellings of Bureti and Malta are strikingly close to the winter semi – underground dwellings of the Arctic tribes of the XVII—XVIII centuries. Such were, for example, valkars, or literally «houses from the jaws of a whale», among the settled Chukchi. The skeleton of the valkars, as can be seen from their very name, served as the jaws of a whale, and the walls were made of vertebrae and other large bones of this animal. Described by Russian travelers at the end of the XVIII century. The Valkars of the Chukchi coincide with the Paleolithic dwellings of the Bureti not only in terms of construction techniques, but also in size, shape and in such characteristic details as the presence of pillars wedged in pits for stability with stones.

      Inside the dwellings of Bureti and Malta, numerous stone tools close to the Early Madlen ones of Eastern and Western Europe, abandoned or lost by their inhabitants, as well as rich sets of jewelry and art products, including sculptural images of women and flying birds, remained.

      On the rocks in the valley of the Lena River, near the village of Shishkin, under the protection of stone cornices, images of extinct animals of the Quaternary period – wild horses and a primitive bull, whose bones are found in the layers of Paleolithic sites, have survived.

      However, already in these settlements, which are extremely close in their features to European ones, there are also such cultural features that are not characteristic of the Upper Paleolithic of Europe.

      Thorough and extensive excavations of a number of settlements (Afontova Mountain in Krasnoyarsk, Kaiskaya Mountain in Irkutsk, Shishkina Makarova on Lena, Oshurkovo and Nyangi on Selenga, Srostki in Altai) have shown that everywhere in this vast expanse of Eastern Siberia in the Upper Paleolithic, both the forms and the technique of making stone products change dramatically. The bulk of stone tools are represented here by things of a completely unusual type compared to European ones. These are mainly large semi-lunar scrapers with a convex arc-shaped blade, as well as massive chopping tools made of whole oblong pebbles, one end of which is turned by a transverse cleavage into a steep, almost vertical blade, usually only slightly trimmed with upholstery. Very characteristic of settlements of this kind are peculiar products such as skobels, made of whole pebbles, which have a wide wedge-shaped blade formed at one end with wide chips directed from both sides.

      Even more unexpected is the fact that in the Upper Paleolithic of Siberia, such techniques and tools are found that in Europe and Central Asia are known only in the Mousterian time. Such, for example, are the nuclei of the archaic disc-shaped type; from the wide and massive triangular plates removed from them, pointed points of the same archaic appearance were made, similar in appearance to Mousterian pointed points. Often such pointy points are so similar to Mousterian ones that they can be distinguished only by the material. The scrapers are also characteristic of the Siberian Upper Paleolithic in their archaic appearance, the forms and character of the decoration of which again repeat the forms specific to the Mousterian monuments of the West.

      However, in the Siberian settlements, the Upper Paleolithic technique of separating long knife-shaped plates with regular parallel faces on the back was well known. There are stone products of very perfect and late forms in comparison with European ones: conical and prismatic nuclei of regular cut, narrow and long knife-shaped plates, thin points. There are, in addition, simple and coarse incisors compared to European ones. There are miniature scrapers, often disc-shaped, similar to the later (Azilian) scrapers of Western Europe. In the layers of the Upper Paleolithic settlements of Siberia, along with tools of the Mousterian types, bone products typical of the Upper Paleolithic are also found, including the so-called «wands of chiefs», as well as serrated harpoons of flat Azilian shapes and bone points that served as spearheads or darts.

      Upper Paleolithic products from Siberia: 1 – a prismatic – type nucleus; 2 – a flat pebble scraper; 3 – a laurel-shaped tip; 4 – a bone harpoon; 5 – a liner tip; 6 – a pointed tip. 1, 2 and 6 – from Transbaikalia; 3, 4 and 5 – from Verkholenskaya Mountain, near Irkutsk. World History, vol. I, Editor-in-Chief E. M. Zhukov, M., State Publishing House of Political Literature, 1956, p. 79

      The material from which stone tools were made is changing. Previously, mainly local gray and black flint, lying in limestones, was used. Now the main raw materials for the masters of the Stone Age are boulders of quartzite, pebbles of «black and green jasper shale, collected on the banks of the Angara, Selenga, Lena, Yenisei and other Siberian rivers.

      Changes in culture cover not only the field of the technique of making stone and bone tools; the previously rich art is almost completely disappearing; the nature of settlements is changing; instead of extensive permanent dwellings, light portable tents-plagues are spreading, apparently.

      Recent discoveries have revealed that a culture similar to the Upper Paleolithic of Siberia existed at the same time in the foothills of the Urals (on the Chusovaya River), in Altai and in Northern Kazakhstan, as well as along the upper course of the Irtysh River. To the south and east of Lake Baikal, monuments of the Upper Paleolithic culture, identical with the Angara-Yenisei, have been traced in the basin of the Tola and Orkhon rivers (on the territory of Mongolia). Here they closely merge with the Upper Paleolithic of Northern China.

      Neolithic monuments are open in all regions of Siberia. In the 3rd millennium BC, the Caucasian tribes living in the foothills of the Sayan and Altai, representatives of the Afanasiev culture, were engaged in cattle breeding and learned how to process metal (copper and bronze), while the population of the more northern forest strip was still at the Neolithic

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