Before Russian colonization began in the late 16th century, Siberia was inhabited by a large number of small ethnic groups whose members subsisted either as hunter-gatherers or as pastoral nomads relying on domestic reindeer. The largest of these groups, however, the Sakha (Yakut), raised cattle and horses.
The Palaeolithic and Mesolithic inhabitants of Siberia were hunter-gatherers, whose prey consisted of mammoths and reindeer, and occasionally fish as well. In the 6th millennium BC, pottery spread across the whole of Siberia, which scholars treat as the beginning of the Siberian neolithic.
Around 38,000 years ago, these people migrated to Siberia from Europe and Asia. They adapted quickly to the region's frigid Ice Age conditions, the team reports. DNA from two 31,600-year-old teeth (two views of each tooth shown) in Russia helped identify a group of Siberians who trekked into North America.
Indirect evidence of human populations in north-eastern Siberia goes back to more than 40,000 years ago. While it had previously been thought that these remains might be from the ancestors of native North Americans, the DNA data suggests otherwise.
The Russian conquest of Siberia began in July 1580 when some 540 Cossacks under Yermak Timofeyevich invaded the territory of the Voguls, subjects to Kuchum Khan, rule of the of Sibir Khanate. They were accompanied by some Lithuanian and German mercenaries and prisoners of war.
The people, known as the Ancient North Siberians, endured extreme conditions during the late Pleistocene (often referred to as the Ice Age) and survived by hunting woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and bison.
Siberia entered the flow of Russian history relatively late, at the end of the sixteenth century. The official Russian incursion into Siberia dates to 1581, when the Cossack hetman Ermak Timofeevich led a detachment across the Ural Mountains and soon after defeated the forces of the Khanate of Sibir'.
The vast majority of the Siberian population (over 85%) is Slavic and other Indo-European ethnicities, mainly the Russians, including their subethnic group Siberians, Ukrainians, and Germans.
Indigenous Americans, who include Alaska Natives, Canadian First Nations, and Native Americans, descend from humans who crossed an ancient land bridge connecting Siberia in Russia to Alaska tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists are unclear when and where these early migrants moved from place to place.
During the Soviet era the government attempted to settle these groups on collective farms and to introduce new occupations, but some groups, such as the Koryak and the Nenets, still engage in their traditional pursuits. Other Siberian peoples include the Chukchi, Evenk, Ket, Khanty and Mansi, Sakha, and Yukaghir.
The Siberians, or Siberiaks, (Russian: сибиряки, romanized: sibiryaki, pronounced [sibirjaki]) are the majority inhabitants of Siberia, as well as the (sub)ethnic or ethnographic group of the Russians.
The smallest of these Indigenous groups are the Enets (350 people) and the Oroks (450 people), while the largest are the Nenets and Evenks, which both have nearly 30,000 members. Some Russian aborigines – are nomads, who migrate every year through Arctic tundra with their reindeer herds.
In 1922 Siberia became part of the Soviet Union. The idea of an independent Siberia was considered in 1989, during the election of the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union, but they reached a compromise with the Siberian Agreement, which gave more regional power to the local leaders.
Russian settlement
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Russian people that migrated into Siberia were hunters, and those who had escaped from Central Russia: fugitive peasants in search for life free of serfdom, fugitive convicts, and Old Believers.
Set on a rocky outcrop in southern Siberia, Chagyrskaya Cave might not look like much. But for one family of Neanderthals, it was home. For the first time, researchers have identified a set of closely related Neanderthals: a father and his teenage daughter and two other, more-distant relatives.
It has been a part of Russia since the latter half of the 16th century, after the Russians conquered lands east of the Ural Mountains. Siberia is vast and sparsely populated, covering an area of over 13.1 million square kilometres (5,100,000 sq mi), but home to merely one-fifth of Russia's population.
Inuit are the descendants of what anthropologists call the Thule people, who emerged from western Alaska around 1000 CE. They had split from the related Aleut group about 4000 years ago and from northeastern Siberian migrants.
Eskimos are racially distinct from American Indians, and are not, as previously believed, merely “Indians transformed.” In fact, the Eskimos are most closely related to the Mongolian peoples of eastern Asia. Eskimos consider themselves to be “Inuit” (The People).
Answer and Explanation: Inuits are of Mongolian descent because they share similar linguistic and cultural aspects with the Mongolians. On the other hand, the culture of the Inuits and Mongolians was similar because both practices hunting and gathering.
Yakuts or Sakha (саха, sakha; plural: сахалар, sakhalar) are a Turkic ethnic group who mainly live in the Republic of Sakha in the Russian Federation, with some extending to the Amur, Magadan, Sakhalin regions, and the Taymyr and Evenk Districts of the Krasnoyarsk region.
Although Russian today is the dominant language in virtually every corner of North Asia, Siberia and the Northern Pacific Rim of Asia remain home to over three dozen mutually unintelligible indigenous language varieties.
For all its vast territory Siberia remains sparsely populated. A major cause of this low population density is the challenging climate, that of northern cold. Overall, Siberia holds about eight people per square mile, though many of the farther northern lands average only one or two people per square mile.
Most of the 'housemates' began their long journey in the old and new capital, where they were sentenced to exile for a range of offences varying from petty crime to high treason. They included the Decembrists, convicted for their botched attempt to seize power at the death of Alexander I in 1825.
The ethnic German minority in the USSR was considered a security risk by the Soviet government and they were deported during the war in order to prevent their possible collaboration with the Nazi invaders. In August 1941 the Soviet government ordered ethnic Germans to be deported from the European USSR.
The broad figures that emerge serve to expose the differences in scale between Imperial Russian and Soviet punishment. Imperial Russia sent around half a million people into exile from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and approximately a further 1 million people were exiled to Siberia between 1800 and 1917.