Amazing stuff! And in Siberia of all places!
"People who lived in central Siberia thousands of years ago enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle despite the area’s cold winters. They fished abundant pike and salmonids from the Amnya River and hunted migrating elk and reindeer with bone and stonetipped spears. To preserve their rich stores of fish oil and meat, they created elaborately decorated pottery. And they built the world’s first known fortresses, perhaps to keep out aggressive neighbors.
With room inside for dozens of people and dwellings sunk almost 2 meters deep for warmth in Siberian winters, the fortresses were ringed by earthen walls several meters high and topped with wooden palisades. At some point, they were consumed by flame, a possible sign of early battles. And at least one set of structures was built startlingly early: 8000 years ago, 2000 years before the mighty walls of Uruk and Babylon in the Middle East and thousands of years before agriculture reached some parts of Europe and Asia ...
In recent years archaeologists had documented dozens of fortified settlements in central Siberia, an expanse of pine forest crisscrossed by rivers and pocked with permafrost and swamps, more than 2500 kilometers east of Moscow. ...
In recent years archaeologists had documented dozens of fortified settlements in central Siberia, an expanse of pine forest crisscrossed by rivers and pocked with permafrost and swamps, more than 2500 kilometers east of Moscow. ...
The Siberian findings add to others that challenge agriculture’s primacy in driving settlements and cultural complexity. In Anatolia, the monumental religious structures of Gobekli Tepe were built even earlier, at 9000 years B.C.E. But those people were beginning a transition to agriculture. In contrast, beginning about 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer societies in coastal areas around the world, including the Korean peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, and later Scandinavia, drew on marine resources to support large settlements. More recently, complex, hierarchical societies on the northwest coast of North America lived in large, permanent, and sometimes fortified settlements, all sustained by hunting, gathering, and fishing. ..."
From the abstract:
"Archaeological narratives have traditionally associated the rise of social and political ‘complexity’ with the emergence of agricultural societies. However, this framework neglects the innovations of the hunter-gatherer populations occupying the Siberian taiga 8000 years ago, including the construction of some of the oldest-known fortified sites in the world. Here, the authors present results from the fortified site of Amnya in western Siberia, reporting new radiocarbon dates as the basis for a re-evaluation of the chronology and settlement organisation. Assessed within the context of the changing social and environmental landscape of the taiga, Amnya and similar fortified sites can be understood as one facet of a broader adaptive strategy."
The world's oldest-known promontory fort: Amnya and the acceleration of hunter-gatherer diversity in Siberia 8000 years ago (open access)
Figure 2. Top: aerial view of the Amnya river and promontory
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