Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The taiga – the coniferous forest of Siberia – may have been so dense as to prevent human penetration, which would mean that Homo sapiens reached the Bering Strait by either a very northerly or a far more southerly trek.¹⁶ In the more northerly route, such sites as have been found, Mal’ta and Afontova Gora, for example, cover about 600 square metres and consist of semi-subterranean houses. Mal’ta was probably a winter base camp with houses built of large animal bones interlaced with reindeer antlers. Its ivory carvings depict mammoth, wildfowl and women. Arctic foxes were buried in large numbers, after skinning, which may indicate a possible ritual.¹⁷

The dominant culture of the area, however, appears to be that known as the Dyukhtai, first discovered in 1967 at a site close to the floodplain of the river Aldan (around the modern town of Yakutsk, 3,000 miles east of Moscow). Here were found the remains of large mammals, associated with distinctive bifacially flaked spear points, and with burins and blades made from characteristic wedge-shaped cores. Other very similar sites were found, first along the river valley, dated to between 35,000 and 12,000 years ago, though most scholars prefer a date of 18,000 years ago for the beginnings of this culture. Later, most exciting of all, Dyukhtai sites were found across the Bering Strait in Alaska and as far south as British Columbia. Many scholars believe that early man from Dyukhtai followed mammoths and other mammals across the (dry) strait into the New World. Berelekh, 71 degrees north, near the mouth of the Indigirka river, on the East Siberian Sea, is the northernmost Dyukhtai site. It is known for its mammoth ‘cemetery’, with more than 140 well-preserved mammoths which drowned in spring floods. Early man may have followed the river from Berelekh to the sea, then turned east along the coast.¹⁸

So far as we can tell, the land bridge between what is now Russia and Alaska was open between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, after which the seas again rose and it was submerged.¹⁹ When it was exposed, however, it comprised arid steppe-tundra, covered by grasses, sedges, and wormwood, and littered with scattered shallow ponds. There would have been few trees but, especially in summer, this would have been attractive territory for grazing herbivores, and large mammals like mammoth and bison. Fossil insects found in Alaska and Siberia are those associated with hoofed animals.²⁰ The ponds would have been linked by large rivers in whose waters fish and shellfish would have been plentiful. A legend among the Netsi Kutchiri Indians of the Brooks range, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, has it that in the ‘original land’ there were ‘no trees’, only low willows.

Of course, early man may have sailed across the straits. No artefacts have actually been recovered from the land under the water, but mammoth bones have been brought up. We know that 60,000–55,000 years ago Australia was discovered, and that must have involved sailing or rafting over distances of about fifty miles, roughly the width of the Bering Strait. The general consensus is, however, that this far north, in very inhospitable waters, open ocean sailing would have been very unlikely. Coastal sailing, to the strait itself, and then across the land bridge, is more likely, if only because man would have followed the game. And the fauna is identical on both sides of the strait, proving that animals walked across. Naturally, early man did not realise that Beringia would eventually be submerged. As was mentioned earlier, there were at the time two huge ice sheets covering much of north America, the Laurentide and the Cordilleran, extending as far west as what is now the border between the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. To early man, the landmass to the west of the ice would have been one continuous area. Indeed, some archaeologists and palaeontologists say Beringia was ‘a cultural province unto itself’, showing a biotic unity, and that it may have had a higher population then than now.²¹