Urals: Paleolithic

Abstract

The Urals Mountains was a key loci of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic occupation oikumene. The mountain regions with the adjoining areas of the East European Plains and the West Siberian Lowland have principal significance for documenting the processes and natural contexts of the Pleistocene human expansion from the SE parts of the European continent into West Siberia and the northern Russian Arctic. Past climate change and the regional topographic modelling by orogenesis and the Pleistocene glaciations, reflected by the marked environmental transformations of past landscapes and biota, attest to the complexity of the Urals’s Quaternary development ultimately determining timing and the extent of the earliest hominid inhabitation of this territory. The initial peopling of the western (Fore-Ural) area is linked to the Palaeolithic dispersal into the marginal East European Plain probably during the climatically favorable Middle Pleistocene interglacials. Geoarchaeology records from diverse settings provide insights into the timing and ecology conditions of the Pleistocene colonization of the north-central Eurasia and evidence on the trajectories of the Quaternary environmental development in the broader Urals.