The history of Siberia in the minds of the majority begins with the history of "Russian Siberia", that is, from the time of the campaigns of the Cossacks and Ermak, but people lived in Siberia before our era. Scientists even consider Siberia to be one of the main centers of anthropogenesis.
Ancient world
When it comes to the history of the Ancient World, they usually remember the ancient states of the Middle East. It is clear that such a vision is very limited, since people lived on the territory of Siberia long before the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. The age of the Early Paleolithic site of Karama in Altai is estimated by archaeologists at 600-800 thousand years.
Soviet academician Aleksey Petrovich Okladnikov considered Siberia to be one of the first centers of anthropogenesis. The findings of recent decades fully confirm the academician's opinion. In 1993, Novosibirsk archaeologists on the Ukok plateau (Altai Mountains) found a woman's burial dating back to the 5th-3rd centuries BC. In the press, the sensational find was called the "Princess of Ukok". In the burial chamber, six horses were found under saddles and with harness, a log of larch with bronze nails. The mummy of a young girl (at the time of her death she was about 25 years old) is well preserved. She wore a wig and a silk shirt, woolen skirt, felt socks, and a fur coat.
The remains of the so-called "Denisov man" were also found in the Denisova cave in Altai. The researchers carried out a DNA analysis and found that the remains of the bone date back to a period of 40 thousand years ago. Studies have shown that the "Denisovan man" turned out to be an extinct type of man, whose genome is significantly different from ours. The evolutionary divergence of such a man and a Neanderthal occurred about 640 thousand years ago. Later, these people became extinct or partially mixed with Homo sapiens.
Culture
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The era of the Bronze Age is associated in Siberia primarily with the Afanasyev culture. Numerous traces of the activities of its representatives were first found in the Sayan and Altai. In the III millennium BC, the carriers of the Afanasyev culture were engaged in agriculture and cattle breeding on their territory. Later, traces of this culture were found not only in Siberia, but also on the territory of modern East Kazakhstan, Western Mongolia and Northern China.
Ethnically, the Afanasievites were not Mongoloids. Historians believe that the Afanasyevsk culture was created by migrants from Eastern Europe, in particular, by the carriers of the ancient pit culture, who assimilated the local population.
The Afanasiev archaeological culture was replaced by the Andronovo culture of the 17th-9th centuries BC. e. "Andronovtsy" in the south occupied the territory up to modern Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, in the east - the South Urals, Western Siberia.
Hunnu
For several centuries BC, a powerful Hunnu power existed on the territory of present-day Mongolia and southern Siberia. In Chinese historiography, the Xiongnu appear not earlier than the 5th century BC. era. The raids of the Hunnic warriors on the sedentary population of North China prompted the Chinese to start building separate fortifications, which were later combined into the Great Wall of China.
About 51 BC e. the Xiongnu empire split into two parts: the eastern Xiongnu recognized the supremacy of the Chinese emperor, and the western Xiongnu were pushed into Central Asia.
The Hunnic empire collapsed, and its scattered parts scattered across Asia and Europe. Some of the most desperate or, according to Gumilyov, passionaries, moved to the West, where they passed through Kazakhstan in the 50s of the II century AD and reached the banks of the Volga.
Cauldron of Nations
Siberia BC was a real "cauldron of peoples". Yuezhi, dinlins, presumably Scythians lived here. This era was characterized by waves of migration, the transition from settled to a nomadic way of life. Most geneticists have already agreed that the same Indians, the indigenous inhabitants of America, descended from the Siberians, who crossed the isthmus from Chukotka to Alaska from 18 to 26 centuries ago. Genetic analysis of the remains of the skeleton of a teenage girl, whose age is 12-13 thousand years, which was found on the Yucatan Peninsula in 2014, confirmed the guesses of scientists on this score. The journal Science wrote about the research results.