Context: Siberia is the largest region of Russia, extending roughly 7000 km from the Ural mountains east to the Pacific ocean. There is some debate as to when Siberia was first settled by hominids, with recent evidence suggesting dates as early as 300,000 years ago. The presence of anatomically modern humans is documented from approximately 30,000 years ago. The Neolithic (c. 4000 B.C.E.) is represented by widely-dispersed settlements primarily centered on the great rivers of Siberia, the Ob, Lena and Yenisei. The first evidence of the Bronze Age appears in southern Siberia in the mid-third millennium B.C.E., in the Altai mountains. There is a clear connection between the Yamnaya culture of southern Russia and that found contemporaneously in the Altai, known as the Afanasievo; this connection continues during the subsequent 2000 years. In addition, human remains found in the Altai dating from this period are assigned to a western, or "Caucasoid" morphology, as opposed to an eastern, or "Mongoloid" type. It is likely that these Caucasoid groups were the ancestors of the Caucasoid mummies recently uncovered in the Taklimakan Desert of western China, dating from the second millennium B.C.E.
The cultural and physical continuity between the European Russian steppe and the Altai, extending south into Central Asia, represents one of the great "idea exchanges" of the ancient world - a predecessor to the Internet, if you will. In part, this was due to the mobility of the inhabitants, steppe nomads known variously as Saka, Sarmations and Scythians. Innovations such as horse domestication were introduced to surrounding regions from these steppe nomads, and they in turn absorbed and dispersed innovations from other cultures. The Silk Road, which developed toward the end of the first millennium B.C.E., was merely the formal extension of a process of east-west exchange dating back thousands of years.
Linguistics and ethnology: The most widespread language family in Asia is Altaic, encompassing three branches: Manchu-Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic. Distributed from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, these languages clearly show the effect of widespread migrational dissemination by their nomadic speakers. The Turkic languages expanded in the first millennium C.E. from their inferred homeland in the Altai mountains to include Central Asia and Anatolia; the precise origin of the Turks remains obscure, however. Most scholars agree that the group identified as the Hsiung-nu by Qin dynasty Chinese sources are in fact the Turks, but the ultimate origin of this group is uncertain. They probably originated somewhere in the region of present-day Mongolia, later moving to the north and west. This scenario ignores a probable cultural continuity, dating from much earlier, between the inhabitants of the Mongolian plateau and the Altai-Sayan region.
Other groups were clearly incorporated into the Turkic hordes during the early days of their expansion, including those speaking Uralic and Yeniseian languages. The Uralic-speaking peoples also have an extremely widespread extant distribution in Asia, and may have originated somewhere in the region west of Lake Baikal in the Sayan mountains. The Yeniseian languages, once widespread across the region, are now represented only by Ket, a linguistic isolate spoken by approximately 500-1000 people living near the Yenisei River north of Krasnoyarsk. The Ket have been posited by some scholars to be a remnant of the Siberian groups which gave rise to Native Americans, but this is supported by very little clear data. Interestingly, Ket is the northernmost Asian member of the Dene-Caucasian linguistic family, which includes Na-Dene (spoken in North America), Sino-Tibetan (e.g. Chinese), Basque (spoken in NE Spain), Burushaski (spoken in N. Pakistan) and the North Caucasian languages. If this linguistic grouping is valid, it provides supporting evidence for the proposed relationship between the Ket people and Native Americans, and may represent the remnants of one of the earliest languages spoken in Eurasia, tens of thousands of years ago.
Methods: We are interested in reconstructing the ethnogenesis of the populations of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia, using a variety of methods. Typically, anthropologists have studied groups by detailed analyses of cultural practices (known as "ethnographies"), with supporting work from linguistics and archaeology. Recently, however, a new dimension has been added to the study of human diversity with the inclusion of genetic analyses. Still in its infancy, the field of anthropological genetics uses patterns of genetic similarity among different human populations to infer demographic history, including mating structure, history of migration and admixture with surrounding groups, and population size fluctuations. Based on preliminary genetic data from populations sampled in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan last summer, we have found clear evidence for ancient admixture between groups of western and eastern Asian origin. Does this admixture extend into the presumed homeland of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the Altai mountains of Siberia? Does it include other groups thought to have originated in the Altai-Sayan region, such as the Samoyedic peoples of northern Siberia? Is it possible that an ancient admixed population may have been the source of at least one wave of migration into the Americas, leaving the enigmatic Caucasoid skulls found at Kennewick (USA) and elsewhere? Is there genetic evidence for a unique relationship among the speakers of the Dene-Caucasian languages? By studying DNA samples from the extant inhabitants of Transcaucasia, Central Asia and Siberia, we hope to be able to infer answers to these and other questions about Eurasian prehistory.