Russia

They had begun to exploit certain wild creatures in the south country where they had sheltered during the Ice Age, and they followed them northward into their new habitats as the ice receded. They hunted deer and wild pigs and horses for food, and in time they were to domesticate some of them. Primitive man understood breeding. He also learned to cultivate certain grasses for their seeds, and to crush them into flour, which could be cooked and eaten. The descendants of the first practitioners of this systematic crop-raising and animal-rearing were to carry these techniques northward. However, the movement of humans from the southern lands into the virgin lands to the north was gradual and exploratory. People moved cautiously, edging little by little into the new environment, and the yields from farming were, as yet, sparse and unreliable. Hunting, fishing and gathering whatever edible plants nature provided in season remained essential to human sustenance.

Indeed, the hunters led the way into the virgin territories, penetrating to the edge of the northernmost areas that were free of ice in summer, tracking animals and birds to kill, not only for food, but also for their fur, feathers, horns and bones, from which all manner of useful things could be made. Others trekked upriver and explored lakes to find the points where fish could be found in abundance and caught most easily, and seasonal gatherers (mostly women and children, one imagines) came with the men, searching for edible grasses, berries, nuts and other forest fruits like mushrooms. Normally they would retreat to base at the onset of winter, carrying their spoils. But as populations grew, so did pressures to extend the areas of permanent settlement. Similar pressures affected the primitive societies of central Europe too, so that migrants from the west, including those who were subsequently to be identified as Baits and Finns, also moved into fringes of the north-land.

The people who explored and eventually made homes in the Russian lands belonged to the species Homo sapiens sapiens. They were, as we have seen, genetically distinct, Caucasoid in anthropological type, and capable of speech and language. Their culture was of the Stone Age, but of the later, more sophisticated, palaeolithic kind. We can infer that they were by nature curious, venturesome, ingenious and adaptable.

Their adaptation to their new homeland took two forms: conscious and unconscious. The conscious process involved learning from experience, collectively as well as individually, and the recording of experience through memory and storytelling down the generations. Unconscious adaptation took place over a much longer timescale, as it still does, and was genetic. The DNA of the Russians’ ancestors gradually changed in response to climate and environment. In more northerly areas, where they had less exposure to sunlight, their hair grew fairer and their skin lighter. In colder areas their noses tended to grow longer, allowing the air they breathed in a longer time to be warmed in its passage to the lungs; and, thanks to the processes of natural selection, they developed resistance or immunity to some diseases. Their genetic structure was to change somewhat as they encountered other groups and mated with them, but their essential characteristics are broadly identifiable and have persisted into our own times.

Although we can relate no personal stories from these earliest, formative, times, we can begin to picture representative Russian men and women. A huge research project mounted by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in its heyday was devoted to describing the Russians in terms of physical type and to investigating the historical origins of their physical characteristics. The work, carried out in the later 1950s by Dr V. Bunak and his team of ethnographers, examined no fewer than 17,000 adult men and women in over 100 regions of Russian settlement. The large sample made it statistically possible to map an anthropological type in all its variations. Whereas earlier research had concentrated on the geographical spread of head shapes and body height, this study also registered face size (breadth and height from the brow), complexion, hair colour, shape of nose, thickness of lip, body height, strength of beard growth, and other indicators including blood group. Variations in each characteristic were mapped, and combinations of them were grouped according to geographical area.