American link to Siberia

Press, 9 November 1984, Page 14

American link to Siberia

From

RUTH DANILOFF,

in Diring, Yurakh

"This site is fantastic: just wait until the Americans hear about it,” exclaims Yuri Mochanov, a leading Soviet expert on early man.

From the flat terrace, where his latest archaeological excavations are in progress, you can see the breathtaking sweep of the River Lena as it winds 2500 miles across Siberia to spill into the Arctic Ocean. In the distance, a barge towing logs downstream looks like a toy boat with a flotilla of matchsticks.

If Mochanov is right, Diring Yurakh is an archaeological bombshell. This Siberian dig, 140 kilometres south of Yakutsk, may topple the theories of American archaeologists relating to the arrival of man in the New World. About all archaeologists can agree on now, is that by the year 12,000 BC human beings were living in North America.

Diring Yurakh, like so many archaeological discoveries, happened by chance. The spade of a geologist surveying the flat terrace 150 metres above the river struck the skull of a mongoloid child. Initial excavations revealed five graves. However, it was not the 8000-year-old skeletons which astonished Mochanov, but the primitive Stone

Age tools in the layers beneath the burials. “It is the first time we have seen such ancient tools in North-East Siberia,” he says, running his fingers over the indentations on a primitive Stone Age axe.

Mochanov maintains that the pebble tools — scrapers and axes — are similar to the two million-year-old tools of homo habilis found by Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge in Africa.

“It is evidence that people already lived here a million years ago. If it is confirmed, then we must reconsider all the existing theories about how people settled the Earth, including America,” he says. Until now the oldest evidence of man in North-East Siberia was between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago. While American archaeologists look for traces of man at various Stone Age sites from Yukon to Mexico, Russian archaeologists like Yuri Mochanov look for clues in the Siberian permafrost.

Russian interest in American roots has a long history. While Thomas Jefferson was speculating on the origins of the Indians encountered by the early American settlers, in St Petersburg, Peter the Great dispatched the famous eighteenth century Danish seafarer, Vitus Bering, to the far north to ascertain how Asia and America were joined.

Today, it is generally accepted that the ancestors of the American Indians were Ice Age mammoth hunters who migrated across the Bering land bridge in search of game. Ultimately, all excavations in Siberia relate to American roots, says Mochanov, who became chief of the Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Lena River archaeological Expedition in 1964. Since then, he and his team of 150 workers have covered 35,000 kilometres within a 4 million kilometre square area. This also includes the Kamchatka Peninsula, the new Siberian Islands in the Arctic Ocean, the Commander v Islands in the

Bering Sea, and the Sea of Okhotsk.

Siberian archaeologists are a special breed, true pioneeers who are dropped out of helicopters into the Tundra to open up sites, says Mochanov. He recalls the time he was lost for two weeks when the pilot failed to find the pick-up point. In the short summer digging season, temperatures soar into the hundreds and the mosquitoes are fearsome. Then there is the permafrost, the enemy of Arctic archaeologists. “If it were not for the permafrost, we would have opened up many more sites,” maintains Mochanov. He explains the timeconsuming process of digging a few feet and then waiting for the sun to melt the permafrost before continuing. “Half the time you see the finds and cannot take them, or else you have to remove thousands of buckets of water from the trenches.”

As an archaeologist, Mochanov appears somewhat troubled by the fact that he previously argued against finding middle ’or early palaeolithic tools in this part of the world. “Now I will have to write an article contradicting everything I ever wrote." he says. Copyright — London Observer Service