Today, the Russian Far East, stretching from the Sakha region to the coastline of the pacific ocean, is seen as one of the most remote places on earth, for good reasons. Even indigenous communities that have lived there for thousands of years are currently struggling to cope with the Russian economy, the warming climate and a loss of biodiversity, forcing them to abandon traditional ways of life and worsening rates of crime, illiteracy and alcoholism. However, this was only the case until relatively recently. Far from an impoverished, subzero corner of the planet, the Far East was, as several lines of evidence tell us, a rich and hospitable place even as far back as the Pleistocene.
As well as the new find of a 40,000 year old worked antler bone along the banks of the lower Ob river, suggesting the first humans (or another hominin) quickly pursued an active hunting lifestyle above the Arctic Circle, one site stands above the rest in its archaeological value. The cluster of deposits known together as Yana or Yanskaya, deep in the eastern tundra. The layers record a long history of human occupation, and feature a large 'mammoth cemetery', presumably related to human activity. The majority of the layers date to between 27 and 29ka, although a few fragments of charred wood returned dates of up to 45ka, which would make the site as a whole the oldest in Russia altogether. The tools from these layers are a mix of unifacial large tools and smaller points, used for a number of tasks, and are very similar to assemblages at another Palaeolithic sites, such as Malt'a Buret.
The bone industry here is more interesting, though, as it looks like a direct predecessor of the ones used by the Clovis Culture and of those used by early Eskimo communities. The general form of the weapons and tools made out of bone suggests that these first hunters lived in a treeless environment, and so turned to bone to replace their wood implements. On one mammoth bone tusk researchers discovered two human-like engravings, as well as a group of stickmen-like figures.
This is significant, as apparently in Yukaghir mythology (the ethnic group that lives in the region today) recorded in the 1920s, two mythical giants, the Old Man and the Old Woman, helped the first humans to hunt and settle. This either could be a reflection of the Divine Twins motif, a theme that spread probably during the end of the last Ice Age, or a far older myth that was carried by the human dispersal out-of-Africa, into Europe, Asia and finally Siberia. If so, the legendary giants, who were very much down-to-earth and involved with humanity, could even be a distant memory of interactions with Neandertals or Denisovans. The Yakut and east Siberian folk-creature known as the abaahy, a sort of evil spirit that looks like a cross between a bear, a human and a monkey, has been floated as another distant echo of human-Denisovan/Neanderthal interation. In legends, abaahy are big-boned, big-muscled, and spoke an unintelligible, chaotic language, which seems to pair well with the archaeological and genetic evidence.
It is also worth noting that even today, mammoth tusks and bones have a special cultural place among the Yukhagir, independent of their scientific or medicinal value. Even the ornamentation on the mammoth bones at Yana and modern mammoth-bone engravings follow the same pattern. A few spiralling motifs on bones find parallels on bones in Denisova Cave and across sites in the early European Upper Palaeolithic. There is a non-zero chance, therefore, that a handful of Neandertals, Denisovans or 'Dennys' (i.e. Neandersovans hybrids) visited Yana and contributed to the later giant myths of the Yukaghir.
So far then, the picture seems to be that the Far East was a refuge, preserving not just peoples, but their memories, mythologies and ways of life for tens of thousands of years. It would have been the ideal springboard to colonise greener places, foremost the Americas and the Japanese islands.
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