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Stone tools uncovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans traveled across the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, according to a new University of California, Davis, study. The date is about 10,000 years earlier than archaeologists previously believed.

An interesting movie on the Russian conquest of Asia in 1600s using German and Swedish POWs against the local nations and tribes and at the expense of China.

Explosions have been reported on Monday at ammunition depot located at the military base in the Achinsk District of the Krasnoyarsk Region. "The explosion went off in an ammunition depot, evacuation is being carried out," a source in the region’s emergency services told TASS on Monday. A source in a local emergencies service told TASS that one serviceman died as a result of the blasts. However, a source in the Russian Defense Ministry has dismissed this information. Eight people have been injured, including two military officers, the local hospital informed TASS.

Severe wildfires are burning across an area about the size of Massachusetts in the vast Russian region of Siberia—and now the resulting smoke is arriving in North America, according to satellite imagery. Summer wildfires in Siberia are relatively common, however, the situation this year is particularly bad with around 2.7 million hectares currently burning across six Russian regions, according to the country's Federal Forest Agency. The government has declared a state emergency in five of these regions in response to the fires, which experts say have been fueled by a mix of record-high temperatures in some areas, lightning storms and...

July 17, 2019 Special Dispatch No.8175 Former Kremlin Speechwriter Gallyamov: Russian Authorities Are Preparing The Ground For The 'Next Largest Geopolitical Catastrophe Of The Century' In a July 15, 2019 article, Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Russian President Vladimir Putin, commented on how prevailing moods among the people in the upcoming September 8 Russian regional elections will determine a drift towards greater independence from the center. Gallyamov wrote that the planned change in proportions between single-mandate deputies and deputies elected via a party electoral list will weaken the party discipline factor in the next State Duma in 2021. United...

Vast stretches of Earth’s northern latitudes are on fire right now. Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that are being seen by satellites. All told, northern fires released as much carbon dioxide in June as the entire country of Sweden does in a year, according to data crunched by the European Union’s Copernicus program. The agency said the wildfire activity is “unprecedented” amidst what was, incidentally, the hottest June ever recorded...

PARIS, Oct 13: A Russian meteorite that crashed two weeks ago in Siberia, but whose existence is being played down by Russian authorities, is said to be "one of the great events of the century" by French space specialist Antonella Barucci. Miss Barucci, a meteorite specialist employed by the Paris Observatory said that the Russian metorite, which fell October 3 in a remote region of Siberia "could be the largest and most important meteorite to fall on earth since the last one that fell in 1908, also on Siberia." The new Siberian meteorite has also the added attraction, moreover, that...

Residents of a city in Siberia don’t need to fly off to tropical locales for picturesque selfies taken by pristine turquoise waters. Thousands of Novosibirsk residents — ranging from scantily clad women to newlyweds — have been busy instagramming near a bright blue lake nicknamed the “Siberian Maldives.” The lake is blue, however, due to a chemical reaction between toxic waste elements from a local power station. Environmentalists are warning people against coming into contact with the water. Siberian Generating Company said Friday it has deployed guards to keep trespassers at bay, but insists the lake presents no environmental danger.

Residents of a city in Siberia don’t need to fly off to tropical locales for picturesque selfies taken by pristine turquoise waters. Thousands of Novosibirsk residents — ranging from scantily clad women to newlyweds — have been busy instagramming near a bright blue lake nicknamed the “Siberian Maldives.” The lake is blue, however, as a result of a chemical reaction between toxic waste elements from a local power station, and environmentalists are warning people against coming into contact with the water. “We can compare it only with photos of the Maldives,” said Sergey Griva, a local resident who visited the...

Jennifer Zeng grew up admiring the Communist Party of China and adhering to its stringent rules. But her life changed forever when she embraced religion and was swept up in a government crackdown on Falun Gong. Arrested four times as a young adult and held in as a prisoner in a labor camp, she quickly woke up to the horrors of living in a socialist state. After being subject to brutal torture, Zeng managed to escape China and now tells about the evils of socialism and communism. At a time when more Americans are embracing Karl Marx’s teachings, Chris Wright...

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have retrieved nuclear genome sequences from the femur of a male Neandertal discovered in 1937 in Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave, Germany, and from the maxillary bone of a Neandertal girl found in 1993 in Scladina Cave, Belgium. Both Neandertals lived around 120,000 years ago, and therefore predate most of the Neandertals whose genomes have been sequenced to date. By examining the nuclear genomes of these two individuals, the researchers could show that these early Neandertals in Western Europe were more closely related to the last Neandertals who lived in the...

Scientists discovered a strange, tall, humanoid wooden figure under four meters of peat in a Russian bog. The figure, dubbed the Shirgir Idol (after the bog where it was found), is more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Gold miners stumbled upon pieces of the wooden figure in 1894. 100 years later, radiocarbon dating helped researchers trace the sculpture back some 9,900 years, which made it the oldest monumental sculpture in the world. The most recent analysis of the idol, published in Antiquity journal, pegged the figure at about 11,500 years old.

In 1894, gold prospectors near the city of Yekaterinburg in Russia unearthed not gold, but wood, and a very special wood at that. Specifically, they unearthed what's now known as the Shigir Idol, a 5-meter (16-foot) carved wooden statue that was marked with recognizable human faces and hands, as well as several intricate markings. The statue was believed to be merely a few thousand years old, and it simply sat on display at a Russian Museum for many years. In 1990s, researchers conducted a radiocarbon analysis of the statues to finally determine how old it really is, and turned up...

<p>'A mysterious wooden idol found in a Russian peat bog has been dated to 11,000 years ago - and contains a code no one can decipher.</p> <p>The Shigir Idol is twice as old as the Pyramids and Stonehenge - and is by far the oldest wooden structure in the world.</p>

A stunning wooden statue pulled from a Russian peat bog 125 years ago has been dated as being 11,000 years old after 'sensational' new analysis. This means the remarkable Shigir Idol, which is covered in ‘encrypted code’ and may be a message from ancient man, is by far the oldest wooden sculpture in the world. Previous dating attempts claimed it was made 9,500 years ago. ... The idol was originally dug out of a peat bog in the Ural Mountains in 1890. 'The first attempt to date the idol was made 107 years after its discovery, in 1997. The first...

In the first study, researchers led by Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, sequenced the whole genomes of 34 individuals who lived in Siberia, the land bridge Beringia, and Alaska from 600 to nearly 32,000 years ago. The oldest individuals in the sample -- two men who lived in far northern Siberia -- represent the earliest known humans from that part of the world. There are no direct genetic traces of these men in any of the other groups the team surveyed, suggesting their culture likely died out about 23,000 years ago when the region became too...

Researcher Lilia Kobeleva of the Novosibirsk Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography and colleagues unearthed the finds at the Ust-Tartas archaeological site in the Novosibirsk region of Siberia. 'The beaks were assembled at the back of the skull, along the neck, as if it was a collar that protected the owner when he lived here,' Ms Kobeleva told the Siberian Times. Alternatively, the beaks — of which there are estimated to be between around 30 and 50 — may have been part of a ritual costume, or an elaborate headdress or piece of armour. The beaks will take months to painstakingly...

France - Scientists said Wednesday they had unravelled the oldest DNA ever retrieved from a Homo sapiens bone, a feat that sheds light on modern humans' colonisation of the planet. A femur found by chance on the banks of a west Siberian river in 2008 is that of a man who died around 45,000 years ago, they said. Teased out of collagen in the ancient bone, the genome contains traces from Neanderthals -- a cousin species who lived in Eurasia alongside H. sapiens before mysteriously disappearing. Previous research has found that Neanderthals and H. sapiens interbred, leaving a tiny Neanderthal...

Scientists have sequenced the oldest complete human genome. The DNA comes from an anatomically modern man who roamed Western Siberia 45,000 years ago. It provides experts with a more accurate timeline of when modern humans mated with their Neanderthal cousins as they moved from Africa into Europe, between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. Scientists have sequenced the oldest complete human genome. The DNA comes from an anatomically modern man who roamed Western Siberia 45,000 years ago. His remains were fund near the settlement of Ust’-Ishim in western Siberia in 2008. The male lived around the time the populations of Europe...

Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers reporting in Current Biology on May 9 suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe. The findings highlight the way in which a combination of genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data can converge to tell the same story about what happened in...