Peipsi mines are called ancient geological mines that are found everywhere in the Urals. Some of the Chud workings are several millennia old. In one of his first stories, P. P. Bazhov. The story was called "Dear name", where chud or "old people" were presented in the form of a people living secretly in the interior of the Ural mountains. They knew no self-interest, they were indifferent to gold. By the way, the ancient people mined the noble metal in huge quantities, but they used all the raw materials extracted exclusively for the manufacture of various crafts and ornaments. Another famous writer with Ural roots, Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, also described the Chud mines, of which he personally counted more than one thousand seven hundred pieces!
The age of the Chud mines reaches 4 thousand years, some people in the Urals were engaged in intensive mining. It is not known exactly who the miners themselves were, they left very scanty evidence about themselves. Several poorly preserved settlements, tools and devices for working in mines. Having no other guesses about the people who in ancient times mined minerals in the Urals, popular rumor "attributed" everything to the mythical people - the white-eyed Chud. It follows from fairy tales and legends that the Chud is an indigenous people who inhabited the Ural mountains before the arrival of the colonists. After the Urals began to settle down, the Chud tribes did not dare to openly conflict over their territories, but quietly and quietly gathered all their wealth, all their people, destroyed all their settlements and moved to the mountain dungeons,where they still live.
The Russians called the former inhabitants of the Urals Chudy, eccentrics or Chud residents from the word “chud”, that is, “eccentrics”, “jokes” or “strange people”. However, the original homeland of this term is the north-west of Russia. There the Russians called their neighbors the Estonians, as well as other Finnish tribes east of Lake Onega, along the Onega and Northern Dvina rivers, Chudyu. There is a version that they were named chudyu white-eyed because of the color of their eyes: blue and green.
However, the mystery of the Chud mines lies not only in who was mining here, and not even in where the ancient miners disappeared. Participants of the first geological expeditions, who found traces of prehistoric mining, noted one feature - the huge number of mines and the almost complete absence of traces of processing of the ore that was mined in these mines. Few have been found of the items themselves from the ores of the Ural ore basin, dated to the Chudi era.
Especially many Chud mines were found in the central part of the South Ural mountain range. About half of them know what kind of minerals were mined - mainly copper ores, some rock crystal, native gold and platinum. But with the other half of the Chud mines, the problem is - it seems that the Chuds simply had nothing to occupy themselves with, and they crushed empty, but at the same time very strong rocks - just for fun. It was these seemingly empty rocks from the Chud mines that were subjected to thorough research. The usual research methods used by geologists have yielded nothing of interest. But the methods developed in recent years and used in the widely developed nano-technology, as in the case of the rocks of Mount Atach, have yielded simply amazing results. These rocks were found to contain very high contents of gold, platinum and platinum group elements. Moreover, all the elements were not in a native - metallic - form, but in a monoatomic or nano-crystal form. It is these forms of gold and platinum group elements that are of extremely great interest for the science of electronics, materials science, medicine today.
By the way, it was on the example of the Chud mines of the Southern Urals that it was possible to get closer to understanding how these nano-forms of noble metals could be separated from ore. Without going into details, which are replete with many special terms from chemistry, physics, geology, biology and other sciences, we can say that traces of processing were found here, the technology of which became known to mankind quite recently. This method is called hydrobiometallurgy. Today, this technology is the most environmentally friendly of all types of metallurgy, which is why it did not leave any serious traces of industrial processing of minerals on the Ural land.
Promotional video:
This method is based on the fact that there are microorganisms on earth that are able to synthesize substances that dissolve microparticles of gold and platinum. The climate of the mountainous part of the Southern Urals is such that these microorganisms feel great here and in some water bodies create very high concentrations of solvent substances - oxidizers - noble metals. And then only a matter of technology: the rock containing microparticles of the same gold or platinum must be crushed, poured into a reservoir and, some time after the metals are oxidized, reduced. Moreover, a strong reducing agent is not needed here, a decoction of any herb containing a small amount of tannin or other natural reducing agent is enough.
In this way, judging by the volume of the workings of the Chud mines, the ancient diggers did not receive grams or even kilograms, but, possibly, tons of gold and platinum. The truth about where the chud hid their wealth, we can only guess.
However, some of the most inquisitive researchers believe that all the mined Ural gold and platinum must be sought somewhere in the vast expanses of the Cosmos, since it is impossible to measure the disappearance of such a colossal volume of precious metals by earthly standards.
LYUBUSHKIN Andrey