10-28-2004, 12:41 AM
NORTHERN ASIA
The map of Northern Asia was now starting to fill up. By 30,000 years ago, a large swathe of the wooded southern part of the former Soviet Union, from the Russian Altai through Lake Baikal in southern Siberia to the Aldan River in the east, had been colonized by modern pioneers carrying a technology similar to that of the contemporary European Upper Palaeolithic. Even the Arctic Circle was penetrated north of the Urals nearly 40,000 years ago. There is some evidence that the Upper Palaeolithic technology of North Eurasia may have travelled south to Inner Mongolia on a northern bend of the Yellow River, but on present evidence it seems that at this time such cultural influences spread no farther south into China.
Dale Guthrie's vision of the hunter-gatherers wandering the great Asian Mammoth Steppe, stretching from eastern Siberia right across to Europe, takes shape in the archaeological record of around 30,000 years ago. His prediction of the incipient 'Mongoloid' homeland in the southern Steppe is, however, highly speculative for this period and for Siberia. For a start, as mentioned, no indisputably Mongoloid remains have been found from such an early date. For all we know, those early southern Siberians could have looked like the Cro-Magnons of Europe. They shared a similar culture and, at least according to the story told us by the Y-chromosome lines, they shared genes with North Europeans. As evidence perhaps of a Western cultural centre of gravity, the first flowering of the mammoth culture at this time seems to have taken place much farther west, in Central and Eastern Europe .
The map of Northern Asia was now starting to fill up. By 30,000 years ago, a large swathe of the wooded southern part of the former Soviet Union, from the Russian Altai through Lake Baikal in southern Siberia to the Aldan River in the east, had been colonized by modern pioneers carrying a technology similar to that of the contemporary European Upper Palaeolithic. Even the Arctic Circle was penetrated north of the Urals nearly 40,000 years ago. There is some evidence that the Upper Palaeolithic technology of North Eurasia may have travelled south to Inner Mongolia on a northern bend of the Yellow River, but on present evidence it seems that at this time such cultural influences spread no farther south into China.
Dale Guthrie's vision of the hunter-gatherers wandering the great Asian Mammoth Steppe, stretching from eastern Siberia right across to Europe, takes shape in the archaeological record of around 30,000 years ago. His prediction of the incipient 'Mongoloid' homeland in the southern Steppe is, however, highly speculative for this period and for Siberia. For a start, as mentioned, no indisputably Mongoloid remains have been found from such an early date. For all we know, those early southern Siberians could have looked like the Cro-Magnons of Europe. They shared a similar culture and, at least according to the story told us by the Y-chromosome lines, they shared genes with North Europeans. As evidence perhaps of a Western cultural centre of gravity, the first flowering of the mammoth culture at this time seems to have taken place much farther west, in Central and Eastern Europe .