CHAPTER VII
HISTORY OF THE COLONIZATION AND
SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF SIBERIA
THE earliest inhabitants of Siberia are lost in the obscurity of the Stone Age. All traces of them were obliterated in the dark northern forests, and on the frozen toundras, and, though a few scattered remains are found on the burial-mounds of the southern steppes, these give us but a faint glimpse of the primitive culture and civilization of the aboriginal Finnish races who had their origin in Western and Central Siberia. That an ancient people in the age of copper and bronze already existed on the upper watersheds of the Obi, Tom, Chulim and Yenisei is proved beyond doubt, and, according to the Russian archaeologist, Aspelen, the earliest traces go back some 1000 years B.C. But who these people were, what was the extent of their culture, and whether they were the same people in evolution from the Bronze to the Iron Age, it is impossible to say. AU we know for certain about these Siberian Finns is, that racially they formed part of the pre-Turanian or pre-Turkish people of those regions, and socially formed part of the civilization which was earher than that of the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D. Originating in the watersheds of the Western and Central Siberian rivers, this early civilization seems 169
