From time to time, publications and entire books appear in which it is argued that the Indo-European peoples and even almost the entire white race originate from a certain land located near the North Pole, and then flooded by the ocean. They came up with the name Arctida.
Tilak's hypothesis
For the first time, the hypothesis about Arctida arose in the middle of the 19th century in connection with attempts to explain the distribution of the same species of animals and plants in Eurasia and North America. At the beginning of the 20th century, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a European educated scientist and fighter for the independence of India, substantiated the scientific hypothesis of the origin of the ancient Aryans from the circumpolar latitudes. Aryans at that time called not only the peoples of the Indo-Iranian group, but also the entire Indo-European language family.
Tilak was based on the instructions of the ancient sacred Aryan books - the Vedas and the Avesta. In his opinion, they retained clear indications of the arctic ancestral home. This is evidenced by the references to the long winter, the polar day and the polar night. Tilak believed that the good acquaintance of the ancient Aryans with the realities of the circumpolar nature unambiguously proves their former habitation in the high northern latitudes. The Aryans were forced to leave the ancestral home due to the onset of a cold snap.
New arguments
In our time, the hypothesis about Arctida has been supplemented with various new arguments. The Vedic and Avestan legend about the circumpolar ancestral home, where the golden age reigned, goes well with the ancient Greek myth of the Hyperboreans - happy, disease-free long-livers somewhere in the transcendent North. A number of anthropological finds in North America made at the very end of the twentieth century, the most famous of which was the so-called Kennewick man, showed that people of the Caucasian race reached North America 10-9 thousand years ago.
The characteristic features of the northern population of the Caucasoid race - very light pigmentation of the skin, eyes and hair - obviously could have developed only during long-term habitation of many hundreds of generations in conditions of poor sunlight.
Oceanographic research, which unfolded in the second half of the 20th century, showed the presence of a complex network of underwater mountain ranges at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. A number of well-known Soviet scientists (Academician Alexei Tryoshnikov, Yakov Gakkel, Evpraksiya Guryanova) proved that these ridges went under water quite recently, on a geological time scale - several thousand years ago. Even at the end of the XIX - the first half of the XX centuries. Russian researchers (Eduard Toll, Academician Vladimir Obruchev) undertook searches for new lands in the North Pole region, which were told about by the legends of the peoples of the North and explorers - for example, Sannikov Land.
It has been proven that until the last major rise of the ocean about 12 thousand years ago, vast expanses of the continental shelf in the North of Eurasia were dry land and were not covered with ice. In the Bering Strait region, there was a wide land bridge - Beringia - between Asia and America, through which regular migrations of fauna and flora from one part of the world to another took place.
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Meanwhile, there is no evidence of the presence in prehistoric times in the region of the North Pole of large land masses - the mainland or a group of large islands. Even if there was such a dry land, most scientists assure us, the conditions of the ice age existed on it, and primitive people could not live there.
Anthropologists and archaeologists pay attention to the fact that the oldest traces of human presence in northern Europe date back to the time after the end of the ice age - 9-8 thousand years ago, at most. True, Beringia, which was not subjected to glaciation, was settled earlier, since no later than 12 thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Indians passed through it from Asia to America. But Beringia is not considered by anyone as the cradle of Indo-European peoples and the white race in general.
The craniological (that is, cranial) signs of the North European ("Nordic") subrace were formed only after the large migration of agricultural peoples from the Mediterranean only 6-5 thousand years ago. Finally, recent research into sensational anthropological finds in North America has cast doubt on their Caucasianship.
The question is not closed
Now the overwhelming majority of scientists reject the possibility of both the existence of a vast land with habitable conditions around the North Pole in the era of human existence, and the origin of the Caucasoid race from circumpolar latitudes. However, there remain enthusiasts who continue to defend the hypothesis of the Arctic ancestral home of white mankind or its part - the Indo-European family.
Among them is the famous Indologist Natalya Guseva, who has an interesting identification of the Meru mountains, behind which, according to the Vedas, was the Aryan ancestral home, with the Northern Uvals. Doctor of Philosophy Valery Dyomin claims that he managed to find confirmation of the testimony of the Russian scientist Alexander Barchenko, who discovered traces of the ancient civilization of Hyperborea on the Kola Peninsula.
Modern scientists who reject the hypothesis of an arctic ancestral home, nevertheless, cannot provide a satisfactory explanation for the fact that the creators of the Vedas and Avesta are undoubtedly familiar with the special natural conditions of the circumpolar latitudes. We have to admit that they once lived much further north. Moreover, there were discovered undoubted monuments of the Indo-Iranian civilization in the Urals.
A scientist from Moscow State University, Vladimir Kalyakin, has collected a number of convincing facts that refute the generally accepted hypothesis of an ice age in the recent history of the Earth. This means that in the extreme north of Europe and on the territories of the Arctic shelf, now flooded by the sea, more than 12 thousand years ago there was an oceanic tundra climate, no colder than the modern one, and people could live there.
Summing up, we can say that the version about the origin of the Caucasian race or part of it from the now non-existent circumpolar land does not correspond to modern scientific ideas. However, such a verdict can put an end to the hypothesis of an arctic ancestral home only if modern science is considered an infallible truth in the last instance.
Yaroslav Butako
