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By Root 1577 0

A. Ragozin called the riddle of Ulalinka. These two scientists reported in 1984: “Quite recently it was thought that the Siberia Paleolithic was not more than 20–25,000 years ago. Everything changed after a Paleolithic site, bearing no similarities with any site known before, was discovered in 1961 on the slopes of the steep bank of the Ulalinka River, at the edge of the city of Gorno-Altaisk, the capital of the autonomous oblast. Stone tools of primeval man were found here in the form of cobble stones only partially worked over by a coarse chipping. Half or even two-thirds of such a stone retained its original pebbly surface, a kind of scale, which had been removed only at the working end of the tool, at its cutting edge. A person not acquainted with the technology of those remote times would have tossed this stone away, seeing nothing striking in it. But the stone from Ulalinka can tell an archaeologist, a specialist in such things, a great deal” (Okladinov and Ragozin 1984, p. 5). Six hundred such tools were found at Ulalinka.

After the discovery of the implements, geologists dated the Ulalinka site at 40,000 years. This dating poses no particular problems for modern ideas about human evolution. The tools could have been made by anatomically modern Homo sapiens, or perhaps by some late survivals of a Neanderthal population in Siberia. But subsequent studies put the Ulalinka site in the late Middle Pleistocene, giving ages that range from 150,000 to 400,000 years (Okladinov and Ragozin 1984, pp. 5–6). Then, in 1977, Okladinov and Ragozin conducted new excavations and determined that the implement-bearing stratum was much older than scientists previously thought. They stated: “the pebble tools belong to the middle part of the Kochkov horizon, the Podpusk-Lebiazh’e layers, formed roughly 2.5 million to 1.5 million years ago. This conclusion was confirmed by thermoluminescent analysis done by A. I. Shliukov, Director of the Geochronology Group of the Faculty of Geography of the Moscow State University. . . . it was found that the cultural layer with the Ulalinka pebble tools was more than 1.5 million years old” (Okladinov and Ragozin 1984, pp. 11–12). The faunal remains at the site were comparable to the middle Villafranchian (Early Pleistocene or Late Pliocene) of Europe (Okladinov and Ragozin 1984, p. 12).

Okladinov and Ragozin (1984, p. 12) also reported: “Similar pebble tools were found in China, together with two knives made of hominid incisor teeth. This is the so-called Yuanmou man. His age, according to paleomagnetic data, is from 1.5 to 3.1 million years; the accepted date is 1.7 million years.”

Okladinov and Ragozin (1984, p. 14) then posed a question: “was the Ulalinka man an aborigine or did he come in from somewhere else?” It was possible, they stated, that the ancestors of Ulalinka man had migrated from Africa. If so, the migration must have occurred well over 1.5 million years ago, and the being that migrated would therefore have been Homo habilis.

But the Russian scientists apparently had some patriotic impulse, and favored the idea that the ancestors of the Ulalinka hominid had not migrated from elsewhere. Okladinov and Ragozin (1984, pp. 15–19) therefore proposed an extensive search for skeletal remains of a possible ancestor of Ulalinka man in Siberia, hinting that Siberia, not Africa, might very well have been the cradle of humanity. In a paleoanthropological reflection of the wider Sino-Soviet conflict, Okladinov and Ragozin (1984, p. 18) proposed: “It is not impossible that Sinanthropus [Peking man] stems from the Ulalinka hominids.” In other words, China man came from Russia man. The Chinese, however, believed the reverse to be true.

Okladinov and Ragozin were not the first scientists to broach the idea that human beings evolved within the borders of the former Soviet Union. Alexander Mongait, an archeologist, wrote (1959, p. 64): “today it may be surmised that Transcaucasia was within the vast zone where man first appeared. . . . In 1939, the remains of an anthropoid ape, which lived at the end