Lost Civilization of the North
Although anatomically modern humans have existed for tens of thousands of years, we have no record of civilizations prior to about 5,000 BC, when civilizations grew up in places like the Tigris/Euphrates, Nile and Ganges. There is certainly adequate time for civilizations to have risen and fallen. Of course the most famous is Plato's lost city of Atlantis. Any number of quack theories purport to identify it, althoughmy personal favorite explanation is that England and France were to blame, since many times they sent ships via the Pillars of Hercules to invade the Mediterranean. For example, who was Paul writing to in his letter to the Galatians, in modern day Turkey? It came as a surprise to me when I learned in Seminary that the name derives from Gaul, which is an ancient word for Celtic France. That's right. The Celts got around a lot back in the day
Invading ships were no doubt seem coming from somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules, so it is probably reasonable to assume that there was a place somewhere out in the ocean. Perhaps the surprise would have been that they sailed from as far away as England and France, rather than some land mass closer to the Pillars of Hercules.
But no matter. There is an equally mysterious but less well known enigma in Asia. For years I have been curious about the Ainu people, who were the original inhabitants of Japan. They are more Caucasian in their appearance than the Japanese people, and moreover some researchers think their language may have some similarities to Gaelic (Irish). What? How did such people get to Japan? In Japan, there are only a few hundred Ainu left, as most of married into Japanese society. Were they somehow connected to wanderers from Europe?
Recently I found out about other groups of Asians with unique historical roots. The Ket are among several Asiatic groups living in in Siberia. The Ket live near the Yenesei river valley. They look like Asian people, and live much like the Eskimos, herding reindeer and living like Arctic nomads. Their language is thought by Edward Vajda of Western Washington University to resemble the Basques and the North American Athabaskan Native Americans, though this is not a uniform consensus. How could there be connections to the Basques to Athabaska
I haven't seen it proposed by a serious historian/archaeologist, but I wonder if peoples like the Ket and Ainu and other Siberian peoples might have been able to travel the northern coastline of Siberia if you are willing to imagine that there might have been periods of warming during earth's recent history, similar to the Medieval Warming period which allowed the Vikings to survive and to build settlements in Nova Scotia and Greenland, well perhaps the Ket people were able to sail between North America and Eurasia as well via the Northeast Passage, which in modern times was only navigated successfully after 1878-9, when Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, with the Swedish ship Vega did it the first time.
Although the experts say that the warming period started some 11,000 years ago, I haven't seen a detailed temperature chart for the coastal areas of the Arctic. In particular, as the sea levels rose and the Siberian land bridge flooded, warmer water from the Pacific was allowed to mix with the Arctic Ocean.
Did that happen very gradually without major climate swings, or could there have been an extended warm period in which kayak traffic could have used the Northeast Passage to Canada?
The current scholarly consensus seems to be that the Ket and other nomadic tribes traveled from Siberia to North America via the Aleutian Islands to Alaska and then across the Rocky Mountains. Somehow that seems even harder to me than sailing the Arctic and Siberean Strait though it is possible.
Still, I have zero evidence for this idea, so it properly belongs in the range of historical science fiction, at least for now.
Although anatomically modern humans have existed for tens of thousands of years, we have no record of civilizations prior to about 5,000 BC, when civilizations grew up in places like the Tigris/Euphrates, Nile and Ganges. There is certainly adequate time for civilizations to have risen and fallen. Of course the most famous is Plato's lost city of Atlantis. Any number of quack theories purport to identify it, althoughmy personal favorite explanation is that England and France were to blame, since many times they sent ships via the Pillars of Hercules to invade the Mediterranean. For example, who was Paul writing to in his letter to the Galatians, in modern day Turkey? It came as a surprise to me when I learned in Seminary that the name derives from Gaul, which is an ancient word for Celtic France. That's right. The Celts got around a lot back in the day
Invading ships were no doubt seem coming from somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules, so it is probably reasonable to assume that there was a place somewhere out in the ocean. Perhaps the surprise would have been that they sailed from as far away as England and France, rather than some land mass closer to the Pillars of Hercules.
But no matter. There is an equally mysterious but less well known enigma in Asia. For years I have been curious about the Ainu people, who were the original inhabitants of Japan. They are more Caucasian in their appearance than the Japanese people, and moreover some researchers think their language may have some similarities to Gaelic (Irish). What? How did such people get to Japan? In Japan, there are only a few hundred Ainu left, as most of married into Japanese society. Were they somehow connected to wanderers from Europe?
Recently I found out about other groups of Asians with unique historical roots. The Ket are among several Asiatic groups living in in Siberia. The Ket live near the Yenesei river valley. They look like Asian people, and live much like the Eskimos, herding reindeer and living like Arctic nomads. Their language is thought by Edward Vajda of Western Washington University to resemble the Basques and the North American Athabaskan Native Americans, though this is not a uniform consensus. How could there be connections to the Basques to Athabaska
I haven't seen it proposed by a serious historian/archaeologist, but I wonder if peoples like the Ket and Ainu and other Siberian peoples might have been able to travel the northern coastline of Siberia if you are willing to imagine that there might have been periods of warming during earth's recent history, similar to the Medieval Warming period which allowed the Vikings to survive and to build settlements in Nova Scotia and Greenland, well perhaps the Ket people were able to sail between North America and Eurasia as well via the Northeast Passage, which in modern times was only navigated successfully after 1878-9, when Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, with the Swedish ship Vega did it the first time.
Although the experts say that the warming period started some 11,000 years ago, I haven't seen a detailed temperature chart for the coastal areas of the Arctic. In particular, as the sea levels rose and the Siberian land bridge flooded, warmer water from the Pacific was allowed to mix with the Arctic Ocean.
Did that happen very gradually without major climate swings, or could there have been an extended warm period in which kayak traffic could have used the Northeast Passage to Canada?
The current scholarly consensus seems to be that the Ket and other nomadic tribes traveled from Siberia to North America via the Aleutian Islands to Alaska and then across the Rocky Mountains. Somehow that seems even harder to me than sailing the Arctic and Siberean Strait though it is possible.
Still, I have zero evidence for this idea, so it properly belongs in the range of historical science fiction, at least for now.
This Ket family seems well adapted for life in the Siberian Arctic.
This picture from 1914 shows Ket people in houseboats, probably near the mighty Yenesei River in Siberia.
Since I wrote this article, linguistic as well as DNA evidence continues to suggest a link between the Ket and Native Americans. There's no doubt about the connection, it's more of a question how it actually happened.
ReplyDeletehttps://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/254c/b4db878144cd22c866b65a0cd77aa83d6b81.pdf