Continuing with my series on primitive paleolithic tools, ones that resemble Oldowan cobble pebbles, following yesterday's post on the 100 ky Texas Street, San Diego, California site excavated by George Carter (1940s-1970s), I will go back to Siberia.
Recently I posted about two sites there, Diring Yuirakh and Karama, today I will mention another one, on Ulalinka River dated to over 1.5 million years ago.
Ulalinka River site
Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, in their 1993 work Hidden History of the Human Race mention the Ulalinka River site as follows: "In 1961, hundreds of crude pebble tools were found near Gorno-Altaisk, on the
Ulalinka river in Siberia. According to a 1984 report by Russian scientists A. P. Okladinov and L. A. Ragozin, the tools were found in layers 1.5-2.5 million years old."
Little has been written about it in Western journals. The second source I encountered about it, is a travel agent based in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, that mentions the attractions in Gorno-Altaisk, and casually refers to the site on their website:
"Ulalinskaya Paleolithic site
Ulalinskaya Paleolithic site is one of the main sights in Gorno-Altaysk. It is situated on the bank of the Ulalushka River, after which the site took its name.
The site constantly attracts attention of archeologists. It was found during the excavations of 1960-1970s under the guidance of academician Alexey Okladnikov. Exactly that time more than 600 stone tools were found, referring to the age of Paleolith. It proves the fact that the territory was made habitable more than 1,5 million years ago. Although the views of geologists about this subject are still not common. Some experts determine the age of the site in the range of 100 - 350 thousand years; others indicate the date from 690 thousand to half a million years.
Unfortunately, only primitive tools, no other traces of sites of ancient people were found during excavations.
This sensational archeological find became the city’s pride. No wonder that exactly these tools are depicted in the coat of arms since 1996.
The debates over this discovery are conducted to this day - many scientists believe, it would a grand hoax of the 20th century."
Gorno-Altaysk means "Mountainous Altai" in Russian, note that (1) this article calls the river Ulaluska, and the site Ulalinskaya. (2) It suggests it may be a hoax. (3) And that the city adopted the tools in its coat of arms (pictured).
Details
The site is located in the twon of Gorno-Altaysk itself — 51°°57'20.7"N 85°58'25.5"E (see it in Google maps) which is 110 km (68 mi.) as the crow flies, from the famous Denisova Cave.
The megalithic.co.uk website has some pictures of the site.
There is an English language publication A. P. Okladnikov and G. A. Pospelova, 1982 (Ulalinka, the Oldest Palaeolithic Site in Siberia p. 710–712, Current Anthropology Vol 23, No 6 (🔒 paywalled, but you can read the first page of the paper). Which says that it was discovered in 1961 on the Maima River, at its confluence with the Ulalinka River by the cemetery of Gorno-Altaysk. It describes the sedimentary layers in the dig, which produced neolithic tools from its upper layer (younger than 25,000 years - 25 ky), and then, the one with the primitive eoliths:
"The main cultural level of this section, associated with the boulder-pebble horizon, differs from the upper one and from all other known Palaeolithic sites in Siberia principally in the strikingly archaic shapes of the tools and their primitive technology. The tools were made almost entirely from pebbles of yellowish-white quartzite, whole or split in half, and sometimes from pebbles of obsidian and quartzite fragments.
The finds include choppers, chopping tools, scrapers, a peculiar pebble core and tools with a spoutlike curved projection that might have served as cutting instruments. All these tools are nearly untreated pebbles, only slightly retouched (fig 1) [see it below]. All the artifacts are amorphous. They may sometimes have served as cutting tools, sometimes as scrapers, sometimes both functions at once. Their primitive diversity seems to reflect the pursuit of a useful and stable shape. The stone inventory and the techniques of manufacture are so primitive and peculiar that they cannot be classified in the framework of the classic Lower Palaeolithic typology. The nomenclature of the Western European schemes cannot be applied to them."
Below is Fig. 1 from this paper, showing these tools. The article adds that the "archaeological data alone were insufficient to estimate the age of these tools", and that they used other, geological, paleogeographical, and paleontological techniques. There were different opinions among the scholars, with some dating it at no more than 40 ky, while others, including the author of the paper in two articles published in 1964 and 1972, Gaiduk, 1968, and Ceitlin, 1979 placed it in the Lower Pleistocene.
The articles, in Russian, are:
Okladnikov, A.P., 1964. Ulalinka–the earliest Palaeolithic occupation in Siberia. Investiya AN SSSR 1/1, 131–133.
Okladnikov, A.P. 1972, Ulalinka – drevnepaleoliticheskiy pamyatnik Sibiri. In Paleolit i neolit SSSR, vol. 7. Moscow: Nauka, pp. 7–19. (MIA; No. 185).
Gaiduk, I. M. 1968. Kamenny vek basseina Verhnei i Srednei Obi. (paleolit, neolit). Avtoreferat dissertatsii, Novosibirsk.
Zeitlin (or Ceitlin S.M. 1979. Geology of the Paleolithic of Northern Asia. Moscow: Nauka. Yamskikh
Ulalinka is cited by Dennell, Rendell and Hailwood, 1988 "... the artefacts from the site of Ulalinka in Soviet Central Asia, that were dated to the Olduvai Event (Okladinov & Pospelova, 1982), but need not be older than the Brunhes- Matuyama boundary at c. 0.7 My."
Shunkov, 2005 gives it an old, yet more recent age "The available palaeomagnetic and radiothermoluminescence (RTL) dates suggest attribution of the lowermost layers at Ulalinka to a wide chronological range of c. 300 - 400 ka to 1.5 mya (Okladnikov et al. 1985). The lower chronological boundary seems doubtful, whereas the upper boundary is reliable, supporting the age estimates of the Ulalinka site as older than 300 ka."
However, an older dating is provided by UNESCO in History of civilizations of Central Asia, v. 1: The Dawn of civilization, earliest times to 700 B.C., 1992 (see p. 54), though with some reservations; highlights are mine:
"The site of Ulalinka, within the town of Gornoaltaisk in the northern Altai, gives rise to considerable controversy among specialists. Discovered in 1961, it was excavated overseveral seasons by A. P. Okladnikov. Beneath a four-metre layer of alluvial loam lies a stratum of multicoloured clays resting on boulder deposits. In the lower part of the clay, which geologists ascribe to the Kochorka Eneopleistocene suite, a series of hand-worked pebbles is to be found in a seam of yellow-ochre-coloured clay, containing quartzite boulders and pebbles. Palaeomagnetic analysis suggests that the yellow-ochre is in the Matayama zone of negative magnetization. The thermoluminescent date of the layer that contains the tools is 1.48 million years. [Note: Matayama reversal, or negative magnetization took place between 2.58 and 0.78 million years ago]
The archaeological material is restricted to quartzite tools scattered among the pebbles in the clay. Okladnikov identifies several groups: crude pebble ‘proto-axes’, ‘tools with anextended nose’, crudely made choppers and crude scrapers. Particular attention was paid to laterally split quartzite pebbles with dressed edges and tips. Although these artefacts are comparable in period with the Olduvan industry, their general appearance does not allow direct analogies to be drawn with that site or its typological series. The reason is that Ulalinka lacks both stable designs and, most importantly, the usual signs of deliberate working – the struck crest, surface cutting, precise spalling facets and so on. Okladnik overcomes this difficulty by explaining that the Ulalinka finds are unusual in that the pebbles were split not by striking but by being heated in a fire and then dropped in water. Analysing the formation about this site, it should be noted that until more convincing evidence is available, Okladnikov’s conclusions cannot be unreservedly accepted."
Another online reference (Novosibirsk State University (NSU) in Russia, in english) states that "Ulalinka which lies within the limits of today's Gorno-Altaisk, is the most ancient settlement of primitive man. During the excavation of the Ulalinka site some primitive stone tools were found. The fire technique, that is the heating and quick cooling of stones, was used when making the tools. Ulalinka's finds are dated within the limits of the lower Palaeolithic period - from 150000 BC to 1.5 million years."
The final reference is Zwyns, 2012: "The Ulalinka site was discovered in 1961 by Okladnikov and was intensively investigated starting in 1969. The dating of human occupation at theses sites varies depending of the authors (Maloletko, 1972; Okladnikov, 1972; Gayduk, 1973; Okladnikov and Pospelova, 1982; Ragozin and Shliukov, 1984; Tseitlin, 1986) and doubts have been raised regarding the authenticity of the lithic assemblage (Mochanov, 1976; Medvedev, 1983 quoted after Derevianko et al., 2001). Okladnikov admitted that evidence of percussion is not clear (Okladnikov, 1972) but other scholars observed and described nearly a hundred artifacts (Abramova, 1989)."
Conclusions
The site at Ulalinka is controversial, deemed very old by some, recent by others, or even a hoax. It is part of a trend that reveals several sites in Siberia, far older than accepted in the West, described in papers written in Russian, and therefore, ignored and not cited by Western archaeologists.
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