Map of Siberia showing distributions of ethnic groups represented in the exhibit.
Khants at a summer camp, 1888.
Evenk hunters on skis, early 1900s.
Khant hunter with crossbow, 1909
The Koryak language, as well as Chukchi and Itelmen, belongs to the Chukchi-Kamchatka group of Paleo-Asiatic languages. Structurally Koryak is incorporative or polysynthetic. It is assumed that prehistorically it had been related to the languages of the American Indians. It is likely that their common original home was on the Asian mainland from where the forefathers of the Indians set off to America before the Bering Strait severed the land route.
Origin. The Aleut people were believed to have first arrived on the Aleutian Islands from the coast of northeastern Asia or from Alaska, not earlier than 3,000 years ago. Latest research suggests that the aleuts arrival must have happened considerably earlier. Now the settlement of the Aleutians is associated with the time when there was still a land connection between America and Asia, that is, no later than 10--12 thousand years ago.
some time in the remote past corals grew and are still found on the entire fringe of North America - in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. In later times (Tertiary) fig palms bloomed within the Arctic Circle; forests of Sequoia gigantea, the giant tree of California, grew from Bering Strait to north of Labrador.'
(Source: Archibald Geikie, Text-Book of Geology. Dunbar, Historical Geology.
