The Diring Yuriakh site in Central Siberia shows that some humans reached the area long ago, well before modern humans had evolved in Africa, and more or less contemporary with the Denisovan and Neanderthal split. This was at least one hundred thousand years before Homo sapiens appeared.
But Siberia was a harsh environment, and the tools don't resemble Neanderthal Mousterian tool technology, it is more "primitive". Who were these humans braving the cold Siberian winters 400,000 years ago?
I found a very old (nearly 40 years old!) article in Science, Diring Yuriakh: A Lower Paleolithic Site in Central Siberia 🔒 by Forman, Pierson and Waters (1997) discussing the site and its archaic tools. (See it here too 🔓)
This paper mentions the accidental discovery of a site along the Lena River in Siberia, a spot known as Diring Yuriakh where stone tools were unearthed (see it in Google Maps). These were not natural (geofacts) stones, but man-made. The site was excavated by Mochanov, 1992 🔒, who believed they were very ancient, 1.8 to 3.2 million years old, which would place the makers of the tools found there in the Homo erectus or Homo habilis time period. Other researchers suggest a later date of 800,000 years (800 kya) to 1 million years, which would make them H. erectus or possibly the common ancestors of Denisovans and Neanderthals.
According to Richards, 1994, Y. A. Mochanov presented a paper in 1992 at the 45th Annual Northwest Anthropology Conference (The Earliest Palaeolithic of Northeastern Asia and the Problem of the Extratropical Cradle of Man) which gave thermoluminescence dating calculated by O.A. Kulikov of over 1.1 million years (My) for layer 6, 2.9 + 0.96 My for layer 5, and more than 1.8 My for layer 4. Richards recommends caution when considering those dates.
The dates provided in the paper from 1997 (resulting from a 1993 samples obtained at the site), are a minimum of 260,000 years, and a maximum of around 370,000 years, on average, 300,000 years. Interestingly, Mochanov had previously reported other sites with similar artifacts in the same sedimentary layer, and hence, of the samey age, at 14 other sites along a 800 km (500 mi) section of the Lena River in Northeastern Siberia.
This site is very close to America, just 3,000 km west (1,880 miles) of Alaska.
How did these people survive in this bleak northern environment? The paper suggests that the people who lived here probably did so during a warm spell at the end of glacial period known as MIS 8 (Marine Isotope Stage 8) which spanned a period from 300 to 243 kya. Another option is the warmer interglacial stage 7 period (245-190 kya). But, even during the warmest summers, the climate would have been very cold, requiring the use of fire, warm clothing, and effective shelter strategies. This indicates that these people were well adapted to the harsh conditions of Siberia. How long they stayed here, or how much territory they coccupied is not known.
Simple Stone Tools
The image further up depicts some tools from this site, which look quite primitive. The paper reports finding over 4,000 artifacts, mostly cores and flakes. Around 500 of them are "unifacial pebble choppers core scrapers, and scraper planes. A few tools made from flakes are present in the assemblage."
Mochanov characterizes these tools as follows: "these tools more closely resemble those from Olduvai Gorge than from any other Early Pleistocene site, leading the author to ponder the possibility of a non-tropical origin for humanity." Indeed, the Olduvai tool industy is the most primitive one, and also the oldest. The Homo erectus later developed their Acheulean stone tool technology, an advance on the Oldowan one.
Now we know that the period suggested by the 1997 paper (260 to 370 kya) would have spanned the time that Denisovans were living in Eastern Asia together with Neanderthals on its western fringes. We don't have Denisovan toolkits for comparison, but the Mousterian tools of the Neanderthals were far more advanced than the Oldowan. This opens up the possibility that some well-adapted archaic hominin, probably even earlier than the erectus, or a group that opted for simple tools and not the Acheulean ones of the erectus, lived in the cold northern parts of eastern Siberia.
An archaeology blogger (NeilB, 1016) analyzed the data objectiely and concluded that "Verdict: Site inhabited ca. 300, 000 years ago. Likely candidates Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis.".
2024 Research places the age of Diring Yuriakh at 400 kya
More recently, a 2024 paper by John D. Jansen et al., (Redrawing early human dispersal patterns with cosmogenic nuclide, EGU24-4168, updated on 08 Mar 2024. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-4168 EGU General Assembly 2024) used cosmogenic dating to date several Paleolithic sites in Europe, and also the Diring Yuriakh site, where they found "an age of 417 &plusm; 82 ka, which is at least 300 kyr earlier than the previously documented earliest human presence north of 60 degrees. This timing overlaps with exceptional warmth across the High North during the ‘super-interglacial’ MIS 11c (426–396 ka), suggesting that warm climate intervals permitted human migration well beyond widely accepted territorial bounds."
Janssen immediately understood the significance of such an old date in such a northerly location. He immediately suggested that these people could have moved on eastwards and reached America. But this will be the subject of a future post.
My next post will look into another site around 500 to 800 ky old, with cobble-styled stone tools close to the famous Denisova Cave, the Karama Site on Anui River, in the Altai, and then we will explore the subject of an early peopling of America by archaic humans from Siberia 400,000 or even more years ago.
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