ABSTRACT

Siberia occupies the greatest part of North Asia from the Urals in the west to the Pacific watershed in the east and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China in the south. This territory encompasses a 13 million km2 area and is generally subdivided into West Siberia, between the Ural Mountains and Yenisey River, Central Siberia, between the rivers Yenisey and Lena, and East Siberia, between the Lena River and the Pacific coast. Because of its geographic position, Siberia forms an important geographic link between the Asian and North American continents and between North Asia and the Japanese archipelago. Siberia is among the few places in the world where, until recently, most people lived a foraging lifestyle. Siberian economic and cultural patterns are traceable to Paleolithic and Neolithic subsistence strategies (Rychkov and Sheremetyeva 1980). Population density in Siberia has historically been quite low, partly because of resource limitations, and traditional Siberian life-ways reflect common features of hunter-gatherer existence throughout much of the Arctic and sub-Arctic ecosystems. Thus, it has been postulated that surveys of genetic variation in indigenous groups (such as those in Siberia) will provide the opportunity to investigate aspects of population structure that have characterized humans from the Pleistocene to the present (Birdsell 1973; Cavalli-Sforza 1986). Surveys might also help test archaeological and language-based hypotheses about the history of Siberian populations.