While reading Colin Thubron book about his trip through Siberia, I came across this great character of a real Russian archaeologist: Yuri A. Mochanov.

I was intrigued by his theories and discoveries, which - though not new - I support to some extent. His researches seem to give new life to an ancient theory by a German naturalist, Moritz Wagner, a contemporary of Charles Darwin who in the 1870s, argued that humans evolved in cold climates. There are many possibilities that this happened in reality. Cold climetes, severe weather conditions and living "at the edge of existence" could be driving factors that stimulated the intelligence to evolve, to command fire, to create tools, shelters and survive.

Here I found some general information about Yuri A. Mochanov life and researches. I will for sure go deeper, I think the subject it's quite interesting.

Siberian Site Diring Yuriakh and Russian archaeologist Yuri A. Mochanov

Yuri Mochanov is a Russian archaeologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, best known as the excavator at the early hominid site of Diring Yuriakh, in Siberia.

A vast archaeological site in Siberia challenged anthropologists to reconsider theories of human evolution and dispersal. Because of his discoveries over the past 10 years at the Diring site on the Lena River, Yuri A. Mochanov, a prominent Russian archaeologist, has concluded that hominids lived in the far north in the Earliest Paleolithic, possibly as long as 3 million years ago.
Perhaps, he dares suggest, humans might not have originated in Africa.
Mochanov presented his findings at the 45th Annual Northwest Anthropological Conference at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia (1994). Mochanov, a member of the faculty of the Academy of Science at Yakutsk, Siberia, was making his first appearance at a scientific meeting in North America. His presentation obviously perplexed American and Canadian anthropologists and archaeologists. Siberia is not supposed to be a place to look for stone tools more than maybe 35,000 years old— certainly not more than a million years old.
Mochanov’s initial discovery was made in 1982 in a region where archaeological investigations had been in progress for many years. Work there produced several Late Paleolithic sites of the Diuktai tradition (see article on page 5). His wife, archaeologist Svetlana Fedoseeva, was excavating a site of the Ymyakhtakh (pronounced you-me-AK-tach) culture of the Late Neolithic period—dating to 3,000–4,000 years ago—that contained an interesting tomb and burials. Below the burials they made a startling discovery.
“We found absolutely unusual stone tools,” he told a plenary session of the Simon Fraser conference. They were pebble tools; the team promptly enlarged its excavation to find the source.
“We thought it was a mistake—impossible,” Mochanov said through an interpreter. The tools they found resembled materials found at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. Initial discoveries were near the surface, yet geological indicators pointed to unbelievably early dates—1.8 to 3.4 million years. The excavation proceeded following the mysterious cultural layer back into an abrupt slope that rises more than 100 m above the Lena River.
Many of Mochanov’s Soviet colleagues chose to disbelieve and some continue to reject his theories about the site and its perplexing evidence. In spite of Mochanov’s background as a graduate of the prestigious University of Leningrad—a distinction roughly parallel to an American’s having a doctorate from Harvard or Yale—he has received much criticism.
Americans and Canadians attending Mochanov’s presentation undoubtedly had questions, too, about what they heard, saw in his slides, and read in the synopsis distributed to the audience. As one veteran archaeologist commented to a colleague shortly after the presentation: “It’s the kind of a site that you’d be tempted to cover up and ignore, because you’d know you’d have to spend the rest of your life defending it.” Mochanov has plenty of experience defending the Diring and related sites.
Host of the Northwest conference, Simon Fraser archaeologist Roy Carlson, has visited the Diring site and is convinced that Mochanov’s material is both typologically and geologically old. “They are genuinely artifacts,” Carlson said of the Diring pebble tools.
As Mochanov showed slides of the site, viewers gasped at the vast extent of the excavation. To an archaeologist accustomed to excavating units a meter or two wide, the sheer scope was staggering. Aerial photographs seemed to depict an open-pit mine, yet that overall view of a huge gash in a forested hillside wasn’t merely a scene-setter, the entirety was the Diring site! To follow what he had identified as the cultural layer back into an ancient riverside terrace, Mochanov had the help of the Soviet Army and heavy earth-moving equipment. The excavation cuts as deep as 40 m into the hillside.
The Diring site is on a terrace above the con¬fluence of Diring Yurekh (Deep Creek) with the Lena River, 140 km upstream from the city of Yakutsk. The site is due north of the Korean peninsula at 61 degrees latitude—approximately 2,500 miles straight west of Anchorage, Alaska.
The cultural layer that Mochanov identifies as Earliest Paleolithic (Oldowan) has produced more than 4,000 artifacts, 500 of which have been identified as tools. “Most representative are various kinds of choppers, heavy-duty scrapers and unifacial scraper-shaped discs,” says Mochanov in the English-language synopsis of his presentation. The tools tended to occur in clusters, often surrounding anvil stones. As Mochanov showed slides of the clusters, it was not difficult to imagine placing a fist-sized pebble on the anvil stone and striking it with a hammer stone while bits of broken rock scattered in all directions. The clusters are composed of considerable lithic debris. Mochanov says the clusters vary in extent from 10 to 30 square meters.
In an interview after the conference, Carlson described his first look at the artifacts in Mochanov’s lab in Yakutsk. “We looked at some of the anvil stones, which do show battering marks on them, and some of the broken cobbles that could be refitted together.” He has no doubt that they are artifacts. After traveling to the Diring site, Carlson observed bulldozers at work moving the sandy overburden, and saw in situ clusters of broken cobbles, anvil stones and tools.
Mochanov says that according to technical and typological indicators, the Diring complex is unlike any in Siberia and unlike any in all of Eurasia, adding that “it has the greatest similarity only with the stone assemblages of different Oldowan sites of the Earliest Paleolithic in Africa dating from approximately 1.7 to 2.7 million years B.P.”
Surfaces of the pebbles in the clusters, including the apparent man-made scars, were all abraded by sand, indicating that they had been on top of the ground for a long time. Mochanov says that corrosion serves as an important stratigraphic indicator of the cultural layer of the Diring site, which tends to be about 3–5 cm thick, but is 10–15 cm thick in places. It lies on river-bed alluvium, the most ancient terrace of the Lena River, and is overlain by layers of alluvium. The deposits are dated geologically between 1.8 and 3.4 million years. Magneto-chronological dating produced an even older date, and radio-thermoluminescence dating also indicated dates of well over a million years. It was a cold period in Siberia—even colder than the present.
“Now,” says Mochanov, throwing down a challenge to his own unbelievable conclusions, “it is up to the scientists—the experts—to see how right or wrong we are.”
“If these dates are valid, then Diring is the most ancient Paleolithic monument of Eurasia, and one of the most ancient in the world for the time being.”
Mochanov devoted the final part of his presentation to speculation on human origins. He dedicated his paper to German naturalist Moritz Wagner, a contemporary of Charles Darwin who in the 1870s argued that humans evolved in cold climates.
“How could I possibly think that humans could come from Africa without any clothes and live in permafrost area?” Mochanov quipped. He went on to argue that human predecessors required the stresses of living at the edge of existence to be stimulated to evolve the intelligence to command fire, create tools and survive.
The possibility of hominids living relatively close to North America as long as 3 million years ago has staggering implications for questions about the peopling of the Americas. It also would require complete rethinking of anthropological theory. Recent debates have centered not on where humans came from but merely when.
Anthropologists have long agreed that the genus Homo evolved in Africa. Some members of the Homo erectus species are believed to have migrated out of Africa more than a million years ago, but there is little agreement about hominid evolution in the few million years previous that led to the development of the Homo lineage. Many fossils, as well as the East African footprints Mary Leakey found at Laetoli, demonstrate that hominids were walking upright 3.7 million years ago, about a million years before any stone tools are known to have existed. Did a few generations of adventuresome walkers span continents so long ago?
Tools are considered important markers of the origins of Homo. The ability to look at a rock and visualize a completed tool that could, for example, shear meat more handily than the teeth of lions and hyenas or the beaks of vultures is taken as an important dimension of humanity. Most anthropologists accept Australopithecus and Homo habilis as predecessors of Homo erectus, but there are two distinct views of how modern Homo sapiens evolved.
In one view, now called the “regional continuity” theory, the Homo erectus populations in Africa, Asia and Europe slowly evolved into Homo sapiens between one million and 100,000 years ago, with genetic continuity maintaining the connected-ness of the species’ changes. This view has been challenged in the past decade by genetic analyses that suggest that the level of differences among modern humans is so small that the species must have been generated in one specific region within the last 200,000 years. In this second model, it is expected that one group of Homo erectus developed some new attributes or anatomical, ecological or behavioral advantage and subsequently spread to the rest of the world, replacing all earlier humans. This view has become known as the “replacement” or “out of Africa” theory, because Africa is considered the most likely site of modern Homo sapiens.
Existing theory offers no means to explain the presence of a population of hominids living and making Oldowan-style pebble tools in the far north as long as 3 million years ago. Mochanov goes back to the 19th-century theory of Moritz Wagner to suggest an explanation. Wagner, says Mochanov, believed that the cooling of the environment in the Late Pliocene was crucial to human evolution. “As man had to search to rescue himself from cold and darkness,” Mochanov says in his written paper, “it stimulated him to manufacture tools and to use fire.” Extreme environmental stresses, he suggests, are what gave a pre-human species the fateful (and, no doubt to most individuals, fatal) genetic nudge to develop the large brain that defines Homo. “Stress influences mutation,” Mochanov told his audience, and such stresses occur not in the center of a habitat but on the edge. On the blackboard of the Simon Fraser University lecture hall he drew a large circle as he spoke. “In remote places, on the edge,” he said, indicating the upper extremity of his circle, “a very interesting phenomenon occurs.” At the edge of existence—Siberia, for example—”adaptive peaks” may occur. There, on the edge, he suggested, is the likely cradle of humanity.
Carlson says he believes in keeping an open mind. “While we still think that Africa is the most reasonable homeland, nevertheless there are some things that need to be explained. So far they haven’t been.” David Huntley, a Simon Fraser University physicist, expects to help seek an explanation later this year by going to the Diring site to do thermoluminescent dating of some newly uncovered artifacts. Carlson explains that the technique, which dates the last time artifacts were exposed to light, requires unearthing artifacts in the dark of night, difficult at such a northerly site when summer days are so long.
After Mochanov noted that dignitaries who have visited the Diring site included a Cosmonaut who declared that investigating Earth with a shovel is as interesting as investigating it from space, he invited his North American colleagues to join in his search for answers.
The puzzle of human origins can be approached, he says, “only by joining the efforts of scientists of different disciplines and countries. I trust that the joint work in this direction is as important as the joint flight of Soyuz-Apollo.”
Primitive humans thrived in the harsh, cold climate of northern Siberia 300,000 years ago, eons earlier than once believed possible, as indicated by the dating of stone tools found in frozen tundra. The finding means that primitive humans were clever enough to live in one of the most severe climates on Earth far earlier than most experts had thought possible, said Michael Waters of Texas A&M University, the head of a field expedition to Siberia. "Prior to this, the oldest known occupants of Siberia were about 30,000 years ago," said Waters. "Before this, it was thought that only (anatomically) modern humans could have lived there." He added, "It shows us that people even in that early time had the skills to deal with the severe cold."
The study, to be published in the journal Science, adds to a growing body of evidence that primitive humans were more intelligent, organized and resourceful than previously believed. Other scientists reported this week the discovery in Germany of some 400,000-year-old spears and evidence of a skilled hunting culture. Waters said these findings are a surprise because most researchers had thought sophisticated survival skills came into wide use among ancient humanlike animals only with the appearance about 150,000 years ago of anatomically modern humans. The Siberian site is called Diring Yuriakh. It is located on a plateau above the Lena River, near the town of Yakutsk about 480 km south of the Arctic Circle.
Russian archaeologists first excavated the site in 1982 and discovered that it was an ancient quarry that had been used during several different periods of human occupation over many thousands of years. Waters and colleagues from the University of Illinois were invited to determine the age of the oldest site using a technique that counts the number of electrons trapped in the grains of quartzite sand. The Americans took a number of samples, said Waters, and determined that the crude stone tools were between sediment layers 260,000 to 370,000 years old.
Waters said the weather in Siberia 300,000 years ago is thought to have been very much like the present-day weather. Winter temperatures at Diring Yuriakh routinely drop to minus 50, and the soil freezes down to about 1 meter. No bones, animal or human, have been found in Diring Yuriakh, and Waters said it is uncertain how long the ancient humans lived there. Their primary food source also is unknown, he said, although the nearby Lena River probably had fish, and large animals, such as elephant-like mammoths, lived in the area. "We know very little about these humans," said Waters. He said it is not known which of the premodern human species could have lived at the Siberian site 300,000 years ago.
Some scientists have said the crude stone tools found at Diring Yuriakh were actually made by natural processes, not by human hand. But archaeologist Rob Bonnichsen of Oregon State University said he believes the site analyzed by the Waters team clearly was once a home to an ancient people. "It is obvious that this is a human site," said Bonnichsen. The fist-size stone tools recovered from the site are thought to be quartz stones that were shaped by pounding them against other stones until a sharp edge was developed. The process left markings that could not be made by natural forces, said Waters. But the ultimate proof came when scientists found a debris pile at what may have been a toolmaker's work station. In the debris pile were distinctive quartz flakes. Some of the flakes could be fitted exactly into the sharpened faces of some of the stone tools, said Waters.
The sharp edges of a quartz tool, found near Yakutsk, Siberia, shows the toolmaking ability of early humans, throwing back the date of the earliest technology to 300,000 years ago, long before the modern human type emerged.

Thermoluminescence

Although the best known form of luminescence dating is thermoluminescence (or TL), there are several scientific methods which can specify the date of certain artifacts or soil sediments by measuring the amount of light energy they have trapped in their crystals. To put it simply, certain minerals, such as quartz, feldspar, and calcite, store energy from the sun at a known rate. This energy is lodged in the imperfect lattices of the mineral's crystals. Heating these crystals (such as when a pottery vessel is fired or when rocks in a fire-place are heated) empties the stored energy, after which time the mineral begins absorbing energy again. TL dating is a matter of comparing the energy stored in a crystal to what "ought" to be there, thereby coming up with a date-of-last-heated. In the same way, more or less, OSL (optically stimulated luminescence) dating measures the last time an object was exposed to sunlight.
Luminescence dating is good for between a few hundred to several hundred thousand years, making it much more useful than carbon dating.

Cautions for Use of Thermoluminescence Dating of Sediment

The use of thermoluminescence (TL) dating of sediments at the sites of Jinmium (Fullagar et al. 1996) and Diring Yuriakh (Waters 1997) have yielded shockingly old ages that have created a storm in Palaeolithic archaeology (Gibbons 1997). At Jinmium, the results suggest that the peopling of Australia occurred about 110,000 years ago, more than twice as old as previously believed (Roberts et al. 1990). Similarly, the site of Diring Yuriakh in Siberia, a site regarded by many to not be any older than about 30,000 years has been dated to greater than about 250,000 years. In contrast to dating of sediments where optical exposure resets the clock, the more conventional applications of thermoluminescence dating of burned flint and pottery operate on the basis of resetting by heating. The great advantage of the latter methods is that heat is a potent agent to completely remove the pre-existing (geological) TL signals, whereas solar resetting can only partially deplete those TL signals in quartz and feldspar grains in sediments. Most workers agree that the TL results for Jinmium and Diring Yuriakh need confirmation using modern optical luminescence dating methods.
Recent improvements in luminescence dating technology have greatly enhanced our ability to date sedimentation events in this time range through the application of optical luminescence (OSL) dating, which is rapidly replacing the older technology of TL dating. Natural light exposure in air will only reduce the TL signal to a residual non-zero value. The size of the residual TL signal is dependent upon the type and duration of light exposure. Solar resetting of the TL signal is most efficient when the proportion of ultraviolet radiation is large, whereas low levels of visible light and ultraviolet light will be the least efficient. Full sunlight has the highest UV levels, while daylight under cloud cover has less UV and underwater light has the least UV and reduced levels of visible light. Turbidity also reduces visible light in air and water by scattering processes. Solar resetting of OSL signals in quartz and infrared-stimulated luminescence (IRSL) in feldspar and quartz also obey the same general rules, but relative to TL signals, the rate of depletion is much more rapid for OSL and IRSL signals. In full sunlight this can occur in seconds to minutes. Furthermore, OSL and IRSL signals reach a true zero value rather than the non-zero value for TL in quartz and feldspar.
What does all this mean for the archaeologist who is trying to interpret the significance of dating results? It means that one can be more certain that OSL or IRSL signals were depleted to a known (zero) level than for TL signals under the same set of ancient conditions. Even underwater conditions are known to yield complete zeroing of OSL signals. Aeolian sediments are the best, while those deposited in water are less preferable. Moreover, there are techniques available in IRSL and OSL to test whether partial resetting of sediments occurred (e.g. Clarke 1996).
So, it seems that any TL date on sediment should at least be verified by IRSL or OSL. But there are also other problematic aspects to the use of these methods. As with radiocarbon dating, the question arises: What is the event that is being dated? Some have argued that artifacts can move down through sandy sediments, and therefore the age of the sediment may be older than that of the artifacts. Another problem is that burrowing rodents can move sediment and artifacts through a vertical dimension, and then the effects of time can obscure the evidence of the burrows. Certainly though, evidence of burrows in the youngest part of a site are a clue that past burrowing might have created disturbances in the archaeological and sedimentary record.
How can controversial dating results be best debated among dating experts and users? I believe that no matter how modern the dating technology, the ultimate test of a date is whether it can be reproduced by an independent lab with access to the original site. Reassessment of the original context is essential, because without additional dating and reconsideration of the depositional context, informed scientific debate cannot easily develop. After all, if a date cannot be reproduced by an independent group of researchers, then there is a basis for debate. But if a date stands up to critical appraisal, then there can be greater confidence that new ground has been broken, and Science can move forward. Are the dates for Jinmium and Diring Yuriakh right? Only time will tell, but see Roberts (1998) for an appraisal.

Luminescence Dating of Quartzite From the Diring Yuriakh Site

The lower cultural stratum (stratum 5) at the Diring Yuriakh archaeological site, in Siberia, Russia, contains crude stone tools, which, it has been suggested, were made before the currently accepted earliest occupation of Siberia in the Upper Palaeolithic (ca. 35,000 years ago). The stratum 5 artifacts are mostly quartzites, which contain a great deal of quartz. The artifacts lie on a deflation surface, and show evidence of wind abrasion, so it is likely that they were exposed to sunlight for a period of time before being buried by the overlying sediments. Experiments were undertaken to see if these quartzites could be dated using luminescence dating techniques similar to those that have been used to date the last time quartz grains extracted from sediments were exposed to sunlight. A method was developed to extract quartz grains from the quartzites, layer by layer, using successive 30 minute treatments of 50% hydrofluoric (HF) acid. By comparing the luminescence signal of quartz grains from each layer of quartzite recently exposed to sunlight, it was found possible to determine how deep into the quartzite the sunlight penetrated sufficiently to reduce the luminescence to zero. This allows selection of quartz grains for luminescence dating that should have been exposed to sufficient sunlight in the past. Dating attempts were made on quartzite samples from stratum 5 and stratum 2 ( a deeper non-cultural stratum), and it was found that the traps in the quartz grains were in saturation. After determining the radiation dose required to saturate the traps the dose-rate was calculated for each sample and then minimum age limits were determined. A stratum 2 quartzite was found, using thermoluminescence, to be last exposed to sunlight more than 150 ka ago. A stratum 2 control sample, which was expected to be in saturation on the basis of its supposed age, was found not to be in saturation, and yielded an equivalent dose of 440 90 Gy, using 1.4 eV excitation. The evidence presented for a stratum 5 quartzite suggest it was last exposed to sunlight over 74 ka ago

Yuri Mochanov does not dispute that humans may also have evolved in Africa and, perhaps, Southeast Asia. He has brought back some 4,000 stone tools collected at 15 sites in the Siberian permafrost to bolster his claim that Siberia, too, was a point of origin for hominids (see map).
"Molchanov's controversial evidence is indeed striking: a collection of chipped and flaked rocks that are clearly artifacts fashioned by humanlike hands and that he contends are 2.5 million years old -- plus or minus a half-million years.
"Remarkably, that same era marked the time when early human ancestors known as Homo habilis lived and left their remains in the tropical Olduvai Gorge of what is now Tanzania. Mochanov's collection of tools closely resembles the ones that anthropologists have long collected from digs in Africa."
All this contrasts strongly with the dominant view of hominid evolution, which cites warm, verdant African forests and savannas as our most likely place of origin. Siberia, with its -50° winters and fleeting summers, hardly seems conducive to hominid speciation. Mochanov's rationale is that this severe climate actually stimulated ancient hominids to create tools, fashion warm clothing, and build winter shelters - these Siberian hominids had to evolve or perish!
In addition to the climate factor are two other problems: (1) The Siberian sites have yielded no hominid bones nor have animal bones of any kind been found; and (2) The dating of the tools is shaky. They cannot be radiometrically dated. Instead, Mochanov has had to rely on the tools' similarity to African tools of 2 million years ago, magnetostratigraphy, the decayed luminescence of the soil, and the ages of the strata in the 450-foot gorge of the Lena River. It goes without saying that other anthropologists are reserving judgment.

Nevertheless, Mochanov's Siberian discoveries have produced a magnitude-8 tremor in science.
A short summary of Mochanov's research appeared in: Stone, Richard; "Turning Out-of-Africa Inside Out," Science, 262:1963, 1993.

It is odd that some other archeological sites with apparently very ancient tools, such as that at Calico Hills, California, are also devoid of hominid bones and radiometrically datable artifacts. A similar situation prevails at many North American epigraphic sites, where someone wrote copiously in ancient symbols but left little else to betray their identities.