The anthropology office of Tomsk State University houses a huge anthropological base on the peoples of Siberia with a collection of skulls and bones from the Neolithic era to the present.
“Tomsk Obzor” learned from the head of the anthropology office Marina Rykun who our ancestors were, what they died of and how they looked, how the skulls help forensic scientists and neurosurgeons, and also why an ordinary person cannot see this collection.
The first finds for the office appeared back in 1888 - then, during construction and repair work in Tomsk, they began to find the skulls of the Tomsk Tatars, Surgut Khanty and other peoples. Professor Vasily Florinsky, who was at that time the Minister of Public Education and Trustee of the West Siberian District, asked the Tomsk governor to send all the osteological findings to Tomsk University. The founder of the Tomsk anthropological school was Nikolai Rozov - in 1934 he was invited to the Tomsk Medical Institute to read a course in anthropometry and, on the basis of TMI, organized the first anthropological study.
- Wherever Nikolai Sergeevich worked, he organized an anthropology office everywhere, - says Marina Rykun. - He, his graduate student Vladimir Dremov, and earlier Professor Nikolai Mikhailovich Maliev, prosector Sergei Mikhailovich Chugunov - everything started with them, they all investigated what kind of people lived here, what cultures existed. Rozov was also engaged in craniometry, conducted complex expeditions, where there were not only historians, but also geographers and biologists. On all these trains, he collected ethnographic information and the family composition of the indigenous population. After the arrival of the Russians at the end of the 16th century, the process of mixing began, and the number of indigenous people was decreasing. In the 1950s, Rozov still managed to "capture", to fix the external appearance of those peoples who were almost gone.
In 1968, a complex laboratory of history, archeology and ethnography of Siberia was formed. Then the Tomsk anthropologists had the opportunity to organize their own anthropological expeditions, travel around the Tomsk, Kemerovo, Tyumen regions and "dig up" the necessary material from the cemeteries of the indigenous inhabitants of Siberia. In winter, employees of the anthropology department (Dremov, Kim, Bagashev) studied the archives, and in the rest of the seasons they went on exploration and expeditions.
- Vladimir Alexandrovich Dremov, like his students - Arkady Romanovich Kim, Anatoly Nkiolaevich Bagashev - described all expeditions in their diaries. There are many sketches of things, maps of the location of this or that burial ground. Here is a drawing of a snuff-box found in the grave, the skull of its owner is also kept here in the office. And here he describes shamanic rituals: “The owner brings the horse in the evening, his relatives and relatives follow the owner, then they set foot on the fires, Abyz begins to chant,” Marina Rykun reads an excerpt from the anthropologist's notes. - Dremov talked a lot with the indigenous people, wrote down their dialects. All the data he received made it possible to trace which people, where they came from, who, where they came from. In an amicable way, all these diaries should be published, archaeologists are often interested.
The obtained scientific data were published by Tomsk anthropologists in numerous articles, monographs, master's and doctoral dissertations. And in the fourth volume of Essays on the cultural genesis of the peoples of Western Siberia "Rasogenesis of the indigenous population" (1998), an exhaustive scientific base on the craniology of the Ugric, Samoyed and Turkic ethnic groups is collected and many aspects of the origin and degree of kinship of the West Siberian groups with the population of other regions are revealed.
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In the next 100-200 years, there will be no such research, - adds the head.
The skulls and skeletons in the collection allow scientists to determine from what the peoples of Siberia died and what they were sick with. According to Marina Rykun, there are entire anatomical atlases about the diseases of ancient people.
For example, two skulls on the left show how the surface of the bone is mottled. Marina Rykun suggests that these are traces of metastases from cancer, and, according to her, people should have experienced terrible pain from this:
Some died of trepanation - the head of the office shows several skulls with holes in the skull:
- It is difficult to say for what purpose such injuries were done - did they perform an operation, or did they perform a ritual? But some have lived with these holes all their lives, this is noticeable by the nature of the edges.
Traces of trepanation are visible on these turtles. According to Marina Rykun, people could live life with holes like this:
The collection also includes skulls that clearly show the beauty standards of some ethnic groups:
- When they want to emphasize their ethnicity, often people want to somehow stand out physically, hence the canons of beauty are formed: large eye sockets, a deformed skull - from infancy, a child is swaddled with a head so that the skull becomes elongated.
When excavating some burial grounds, researchers sometimes find a mass of skulls with the same damage:
- When we studied representatives of the Kamensk culture, we found that the nature of the damage and the victims themselves in each burial ground are similar. All the victims were men aged 30-40, in good physical shape. In ordinary life, this should not be - healthy men die at such a young age. We concluded that, most likely, these were military actions.
For example, a skull with engraving marks. This man was most likely hit by a rider, after which he tried to finish off his opponent several times:
There are also more prosaic injuries - for example, here is a trace from an archaeologist's shovel:
But in what the ancient people "won" over the modern ones, it is in the condition of the teeth:
“Ancient populations had healthier teeth than humans do today. Their diseases differed depending on the type of activity, and, therefore, food - the hunters had a lot of meat, and they had tartar, while the gatherers suffered more from caries. But in general, the teeth were much better - no chips, nothing, although this is an adult and the 3rd century BC. Then, when the food began to be processed by fire and became softer, periodontal disease began to appear. A special surge of diseases occurs in the Middle Ages, when sugar appears.
And this is the most ancient exhibit of the collection - a human skull of the Neolithic era, found in the village of Ust-Isha, Altai Territory. This is the middle of the third millennium BC - the last period of the Stone Age. Its appearance has been reconstructed - from the image on the right, you can imagine what a man of that era looked like:
All skulls in the collection are systematized (more than 5,500 items), numbered and arranged on shelves. Each skull, upon entering the collection, must be measured according to 80 characteristics.
- The skull gives a lot of knowledge about the race of a person, about his anthropological type: for this we measure the height and width of the face, the height of the orbit, and the nose. We count and group all this in a series, - says Marina Rykun, - In addition to skulls, we have a repository of postcranial skeletons. They allow us to determine in more detail the physiology and type of human activity, what was the height, what weight, what did the person do, was he a hunter, fisherman or gatherer? Now we are visited by various researchers, including foreign ones, who need material for genetic analysis, to study the material stored in the office using new modern methods. All human remains and skull, teeth, postcranial skeleton are examined.
Unlike scientists, a “common” person will not be able to see alive:
- The difference between all university museums is that they are scientific. They study, they do candidate, doctoral work, they teach students. In no way are these museums that should make money through exhibitions. This collection is not for display, especially since human remains are a rather delicate topic and the skulls we keep are more of an object of study than a museum exhibit, explains Marina. - Now doctors come to us - future neurosurgeons. They study the base of the skull, where a lot of vessels pass, because it is important for them to know this variety of shapes of the holes in which the vessels pass during surgical operations.
In addition to neurosurgeons and archaeological students, the collection is also visited by orthodontists who work with serious pathological cases, such as deformities of the dentition. With the help of skulls, they study the characteristics of the disease in a particular region of Siberia and develop new methods of treatment. Or, for example, criminologists - Marina Rykun teaches them to determine the anthropological type of a person and advises if human bones are found during construction. On the basis of the anthropology office, students, bachelors and masters have been studying for many years, who want to connect their professional activities with archeology, paleoanthropology, social anthropology.
- Preservation of such a unique, valuable material as craniological material, which is an important source of study of the ancient history of peoples not only of Western Siberia, but of the entire Northern Eurasia - this is one of the primary tasks of our anthropology office, says Marina Rykun.