2,000-year-old Warrior Armor Made of Reindeer Antlers Found on the Arctic Circle

Ancient Origins

By: The Siberian Times Reporter

 The ceremonial suit was embellished with decorations and left as a sacrifice for the gods by ancient bear cult polar people, say archeologists. The discovery is the oldest evidence of armor found in the north of western Siberia, and was located at the rich Ust-Polui site, dating to between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD.

Earlier discoveries at the site indicate a bear cult among these ancient people.

 Archeologist Andrey Gusev, from the Scientific Research Centre of the Arctic in Salekhard, said the plates of armor found at the site are all made from reindeer antlers.

'The largest were 23-25 centimetres in length (pictured upper left). Others are 12-14 centimetres in length, thinner and richly ornamented (pictured upper right and bottom).' Pictures: Andrey Gusev

'There are about 30 plates in the collection of Ust-Polui,' he said. 'They differ regarding the degree of preservation, as well as the size, location of mounting holes, and the presence or absence of ornamentation.'

 The largest were 23-25 centimetres in length. In ancient times, they would have been fixed to a leather base and offered a reliable means of protection.

Others are 12-14 centimetres in length, thinner and richly ornamented.

'I'm writing still under the impression, as I've just seen these things. This is literally a world scale discovery'. Picture: Bear ring, bronze, finding of 2013, by Andrey Gusev

'The ornamentation on the plates can be individual, that is after the thorough analysis we could say how many warriors left armor here, judging by the style of decorations.'

 Other conical shaped armor is seen as plates on helmets worn by the ancient warriors. 'In the taiga zone of Western Siberia, finds of real iron helmets were extremely rare,' he said. 'But in the middle of the first millennium AD, bronze images appeared of people wearing headdresses clearly resembling helmets. '

A likely explanation may be a long tradition of making antler helmets.'

According to Gusev Yamal, the armor resembled the design used by Kulai peole. Picture: Alexander Soloviev

Gusev said the armor resembled the warrior picture here, which relates to designs used by the Kualai people, hunters and fishermen native to the taiga.

 He believes the armor was deliberately left at Ust-Polui, an ancient sacred place, as a gift or sacrifice to the gods.

As previously revealed by The Siberian Times, a 2,000 year old ring found at the same site is seen as proof of a bear cult among these ancient polar people who left no written records.

Made of high quality bronze, this ancient Arctic jewellery features an image of a bear's head and paws. 'The ring is tiny in diameter so even a young girl, let alone a woman, cannot wear it,' he said. 'We concluded that it was used in a ritual connected with a bear cult and was put on the bear claw.'

A 2,000 year old ring found at the same site is seen as proof of a bear cult among these ancient polar people who left no written records. Pictures: Andrey Gusev

The theory is that the ring was fitted to the claw of a slain bear, an animal worshipped by ancient Khanty tribes as an ancestor and a sacred animal. 'After killing the bear they had a bear festival to honor the animal's memory. The head and front paws a bear was adorned with a handkerchief, rings, and a few days lying in the house.’

 'This combination of images on the ring and the fact that it was found in the sanctuary of Ust-Polui led us to believe that a bear cult was also practiced there.'

Top Image: 'The ornamentation on the plates can be individual, that is after the thorough analysis we could say how many warriors left armor here.' Picture: Andrey Gusev Insert: According to Gusev Yamal armor resembled the design used by Kulai peole. Picture: Alexander Soloviev

The article ‘2,000-year-old Warrior Armour Made of Reindeer Antlers Found on the Arctic Circle’ originally appeared on The Siberian Times and has been republished with permission.

Oldest Twin Remains Found in Siberia

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News

A team of Canadian and Russian researchers investigating an early Neolithic cemetery in Siberia have identified the world’s oldest set of human twins, buried with their young mother.
The skeleton of the woman was exhumed in 1997 from a hunter-gatherer cemetery in south-eastern Siberia. Found with 15 marmot teeth — decorative accessories which were probably attached to clothing — the remains were photographed and labelled, but were not investigated by anthropologists.
Now Angela Lieverse, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and colleagues Andrzej Weber from the University of Alberta, Canada, and Vladimir Bazaliiskii from Irkutsk University, Russia, have examined the skeleton and found remains of twin fetuses nestled between the pelvis and upper legs.
Ancient Images of a Mother Giving Birth Found
The twins, about 36 to 40 weeks old, probably suffocated during their mother’s troubled labor nearly 8,000 years ago.
“This is not only one of the oldest archaeologically documented cases of death during childbirth, but also the earliest confirmed set of human twins in the world,” Lieverse said.
Radiocarbon dating on small samples of the mother’s and twins’ bones confirmed the skeletal remains are about 7,700 years old.
Death from childbirth was quite common in prehistoric and pre-modern societies, but it has rarely been documented.
Video: How Twins Advance Science
This could be because women and their children were rarely buried together or simply because the delicate remains of the unborn didn’t survive.
Evidence of twins is exceptionally rare.
“They are basically invisible from the archaeological record,” Lieverse told Discovery News.
She noted that only one other case of confirmed human twins has been reported in the archaeological literature. The case involved 400-year-old twin remains, aged about 24 week gestation, which were excavated from a burial in South Dakota. However, death for the twins and their mother did not appear to have resulted from complications related to premature childbirth.
Twins Born 87 Days Apart
According to Lieverse, the skeleton of the Siberian woman, who lived with her Neolithic community near the shore of Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest, tells “a compelling story and very personal window into life—and death—almost 8,000 years ago.”
The researcher estimates the woman was in her early twenties when she went into labor. She likely didn’t know she was having twins.
The location of the fetal remains suggests the first baby was breech — coming out feet first — a dangerous condition complicated by the presence of the twin.
While the first baby was partially delivered, at some point labor was obstructed, either by interlocked twins, head entrapment or some other condition such as the infant’s arms beside or behind its head.
Supermom Primates Raise Twins
There was nothing her community could do for her.
“Without the skills, experience and technology of modern medical practictioners, this case of dystocia [obstructed labor] would have been a virtual death sentence for all three individuals,” Lieverse and colleagues wrote in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.
Obstructed labor accounted for as many as 70 percent of maternal deaths worldwide even in the late 20th century.
In the end, the mother would have succumbed to infection, bleeding or exhaustion, taking her suffocated twins with her to the grave.
Image: The skeleton of the mother in her grave pit. The small bones in her pelvic-abdominal area and between her thighs are the remains of the infants. Credit: Angela Lieverse.

Prehistoric Grave May Be Earliest Example of Death During Childbirth

by Megan Gannon
Live Science

Fetal bones are clearly visible around the abdomen, pelvis and thighs of this woman, buried between 7725 and 7630 years ago, according to carbon dating. Credit: Vladimir Bazaliiskii

Archaeologists say they've made a grim discovery in Siberia: the grave of a young mother and her twins, who all died during a difficult childbirth about 7,700 years ago.
The finding may be the oldest confirmed evidence of twins in history and one of the earliest examples of death during childbirth, the researchers say.
The grave was first excavated in 1997 at a prehistoric cemetery in Irkutsk, a Russian city near the southern tip of Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest freshwater lake in the world. The cemetery has been dubbed Lokomotiv because it was exposed in the base of a hill that was being carved out during construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1897. [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]
Because the cemetery is partially covered by city development, it hasn't been fully excavated. All 101 of the bodies found so far at Lokomotiv were members of a hunter-gatherer community that roamed the area between 8,000 and 7,000 years ago. It's rare to find transient hunter-gatherer communities who buried their dead in formal cemeteries, but archaeologists have documented this practice at several other sites in northeastern Asia.
Angela Lieverse, an archaeologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, studies these communities with the Baikal-Hokkaido Archaeology Project. In 2012, Lieverse was revisiting some of the bones found at Lokomotiv, which were in storage at Irkutsk State University. The occupants of the grave in question had initially been interpreted as a mother, 20 to 25 years old, and a single child. But when Lieverse pulled out the box of fetal remains, she said she quickly realized there were duplicates of four or five of the fragile bones.
"Within 5 minutes, I said to my colleague, 'Oh my gosh; these are twins,'" Lieverse told Live Science.
The fetal bones were all found within the mother's pelvic area and between her thighs. By analyzing the original placement of the remains, Lieverse reconstructed a traumatic childbirth scenario that even today — with modern medicine and the option of a C-section — would have been risky for the mother and her babies.
It seemed that one of the twins might have been breech (positioned with its feet down) and was partially delivered, Lieverse said. The second twin was positioned with its head down and seems to have remained in the womb. Lieverse thinks the breech baby may have been trapped or locked with its sibling, leading to a fatal obstructed birth.
"It might be a bit circumstantial, but I think it's quite strong," Lieverse said of her interpretation. She added that there has been very little postmortem shifting of the bones found at Lokomotiv, and everything is in place on the mother, even her ribs and little bones in her hands.
What makes the discovery remarkable is that cases of death during childbirth and instances of twins tend to be invisible in the archaeological record. There have been some cases of babies of a similar age buried in the same grave, but even if you had "impeccably preserved DNA," it would still be difficult to tell if these were twins and not siblings or cousins, Lieverse said.
Maternal death would have been common in prehistory. Still, it's hard to find archaeological evidence of a woman dying during childbirth — even if she died with a baby still inside of her. For instance, in ancient Rome, the law known as Lex Caesaria mandated that if a pregnant woman died, her baby had to be cut out her womb before she could be buried. Even if a woman's baby was left in the womb after she died, gas from the decomposing body might force the fetus out in what's known as a coffin birth. Fetal bones are also quite fragile and are less likely to survive than adult bones.
It's hard for archaeologists to know, based on this one burial, what this hunter-gatherer community thought of twins or death during childbirth. The young mother was buried lying on her back with several marmot teeth adorning her corpse — quite typical of the graves at Lokomotiv, Lieverse said.
"It suggests either they didn't know she had twins or that dying during childbirth wasn't so out of the realm of possibility that it would be considered unique," Lieverse said.
The finding was reported in the February issue of the journal Antiquity.

Siberian Mummies in Copper Masks Pose Mystery

by
Rossella Lor
Russian archaeologists have resumed excavations in a remote site near the Arctic Circle in the attempt to understand a perplexing find of medieval mummies clad in copper masks.
Roughly 1,000 years old, the mummies were found during a series of excavations that started in 1997 in a Siberian necropolis near the village of Zeleniy Yar, at the base of a peninsula local people called "the end of the Earth."
The archaeologists found 34 shallow graves with seven male adults, three male infants, and one female child wearing a copper mask. Buried with a hoard of artifacts, most of the bodies had shattered or missing skulls, and smashed skeletons.

Explore the Siberian Mummies and Their Artifacts: Photos

Five mummies were unearthed still shrouded in copper and blankets of reindeer, beaver, wolverine or bear fur, while three copper masked infant male mummies were found bound in four or five copper hoops two inches wide.
The best preserved mummy was a red-haired man found in a wooden sarcophagus. He was covered chest to foot in copper plate and was laid to rest with an iron hatchet, furs and a bronze head buckle depicting a bear."Nowhere in the world are there so many mummified remains found outside the permafrost or the marshes," Natalia Fyodorova, of the Ural branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the Siberian Times.
The soil at the site is sandy and not permanently frozen. Scientists have determined that the mysterious people were mummified by accident due to a dip in temperatures in the 14th century. The copper may have also prevented oxidation of the remains.‘Frankenstein’ Mummies Are a Mix of Corpses
Intriguingly, the legs of the dead all point toward the nearby Gorny Poluy River. According to Fedorova, such posture might have had a religious meaning. However, archaeologists admitted the graves feature burial rites they had never seen before.
Excavation was halted in 2002 following objections by local people who feared the archaeologists disturbed the souls of their ancestors. But work has resumed now.
"It is a unique archaeological site. We are pioneers in everything from taking away the object of sandy soil, which has not been done previously," Fyodorova said.Photos: Mummy Stash Found in Italian Church
Among the artifacts discovered near the copper clad mummies are an iron combat knife, bracelets, silver medallions and bronze figurines.
The archaeologists also found bowls originating in Persia, some 3,700 miles to the southwest, dating from the 10th or 11th centuries.
The finding suggests that around one millennium ago Siberia was not a remote and inhospitable site, but an important trading crossroad.
Further research on the mysterious people will include genetic tests.Image:The best preserved mummy was unearthed from a wooden sarcophagus and contained a red-haired man. Credit: Kate Baklitskaya/Siberian Times.

http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/siberian-mummies-in-copper-masks-post-mystery-140416.htm