regions bordering on countries inhabited by the Caucasian races."[1]
This characteristic, although vague, is true. The Samoyeds and Chukchis, as well as other natives of Northern Asia unknown to Nordenskiöld, occupy the lowest position in the culture of the polar races.
All the inhabitants of Northern Asia have been called till recently (i.e. till Schrenck),[2] Ural-Altaians. This name was first used by Castrén,[3] and was based on linguistic coincidences in agglutinative dialects of the Finnic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Samoyedic languages.
Max Müller, following Castrén, calls the Ural-Altaic linguistic group the northern division of the Turanian Family.[4] Right or not, the term Ural-Altaian is very vague for a linguistic group, placing Finnish and Tungusic languages in the same class, and still more unsatisfactory from an ethnological and historical point of view, for it can be applied to different Mongolo-Turco-Finnic tribes all over the world, whereas the branches of these people living in Northern Asia form a special "groupe ethnique."
I shall not attempt to solve this difficult problem of finding a common ancestor for such different nations as Finns and Tunguses, even if their languages proved to be similar; but I shall propose a geographical and historical name for all those people of Finnic, Mongolic, Turkic, Samoyedic, and Tungusic origin, or of their branches, who have inhabited Siberia for a long period of time. The name which seems to me the safest for purposes of comparison is Siberians, or more exactly Neo-Siberians, as contrasted with the most ancient inhabitants of Siberia, i.e. Palaeo-Siberians,about whom Schrenck gave us the first information. This group (Palaeo-Siberians) consists of unclassified tribes
- ↑ N. A. E. Nordenskiöld, op. cit., pp. 29-30.
- ↑ L. Schrenck, Ob Inorodcah Amurskago Kraya (1883).
- ↑ M. A. Castrén, Reiseberichte und Briefe aus den Jahren 1845-9 (1853).
- ↑ Lectures on the Science of Language (1861), vol. i., p. 310.
