Remarkable Russian Petroglyphs

Past Horizons ^ | 3-18-2012 | Hanne Jakobsen

[Renfield]

Artefacts are usually displayed in museums but sometimes there are some that just can’t be put on exhibition – as is the case with one that is hidden deep in the Russian forests.

It was known that there were rock carvings on some islands in Lake Kanozero, and Jan Magne Gjerde, project manager at the Tromsø University Museum, went out there to document them as part of his doctoral work however, when he and his colleagues had completed their work, the number of known petroglyphs had risen from 200 to over 1,000.

“I still get chills up my spine when I talk about it because it was such an emotional experience finding these carvings,” says Gjerde. “No matter how much I explore over the next 50 years, chances are close to zero that I’ll ever find anything comparable.”...

[Renfield]

Excellent photos and illustrations at the article.

A 5000 year old bear hunt has been recorded for all time in bedrock. (Drawing and photo: Jan Magne Gjerde)

The final record of the entire rock covered in petroglyphs. (Photo: Jan Magne Gjerde)

[Renfield]

Ping

[muawiyah]

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1111&bih=574&q=Lake+Kanozero+russia&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x44300e32723968d7:0x8d1f4c865fa77ce3,Lake+Kanozero&gl=us&ei=iB5rT-q-L6mvsAKio-mCBg&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCEQ8gEwAA This is on the KOLA PENINSULA ~ Home of the Skolt Sa’ami

[muawiyah]

Love the total confirmation of the thesis that these guys skied UPHILL, and then DOWNHILL to outrun their game.

Modern cross country skiers can do 45 to 50 MPH UPHILL, and 65 to 70 MPH DOWNHILL ~ or even faster on steeper slopes.

Depending on what sort of slope a hunter was willing to risk I suppose he could go faster.

The point of that being that the Sa'ami hunters were FASTER than the fastest animals on Earth ~ making them clearly the top predators. The cartoon definitely teaches you what skiing was all about.

The "dating" is a tad questionable ~ these petroglyphs are a tad more primitive than the OLDEST ones in Keralia ~ which are judged to be 7500 years old at a minimum. I suspect we'll get a NEW dating on this stuff before long. Or, maybe the quality regressed as time passed and folks got further from the "source" ~ which could be from further South.

Note, the Eastern Sa'ami DNA shows there was some sort of "meeting" with outsiders from some unknown area about 7500 years back ~ it has been hypothesized that these were the fella's who brought their language with them (and that's before the Finns and others in the region today had even coalesced and moved North).

It is always risky to attribute any particular petroglyph to any modern group, but in the Polar regions there really haven't been all that many people in ancient times ~ so such attributions are NOT as improbable as those in warmer areas.

[w4women]

Interesting post. Thanks.

[Paine in the Neck]

Interesting bear hunt pictograph with the skiing and gait change of the bear.

Also, boats - multi-man boats. Is it too much reading into it that they had figureheads of some sort? This would suggest wooden boats with keel and planks, rather than skin boats.

[Sea Parrot]

Simply amazing.

The Greenies aren’t going to like this, they weren’t vegetarians, but meat eaters, and lots of it,

[Sea Parrot]

The Laps are lapping this up, it is their history.

[Renfield]

“Also, boats - multi-man boats. Is it too much reading into it that they had figureheads of some sort? This would suggest wooden boats with keel and planks, rather than skin boats.”

Dale Drinnon (see his excellent blog at frontiersofanthropology.blogspot.com ) claims that the first such boats were just moose hides stretched over a wooden frame, with the moose heads left on; and that the custom of having a carved head at the prow descends from this.

[muawiyah]

Archaeologists have found BOATS buried in Lapland ~ that are thousands of years old. They were seaworthy ~ not big but seaworthy. They were all "klinerbuilt' just the way the far later Viking Dragon Boats would be built.

The theory is that when the Norse made permanent contact with the Sa'ami in the 8th Century, it was more cooperative than some want to believe. The Sa'ami had the boat design; the Norse had the larger trees and the well muscled men; and together they went forth to subdue the world ~ and did a fair to middlin' job of it considering how few of them there were.

BAG LIMIT MET ~ Sicily, France, Brittain, Ireland, Scotland..... all within a few centuries.

think we could even add in the entire empire Pepin ruled. He was pretty obviously of small Sa'ami-lie stature!

These engravings are several thousand years older than these guys are letting on. The boat thing is probably the cause. 5,000 years takes you back to the foundations of Egypt and Sumer and they had boats. A more realistic date of 7,500 takes you back before those sources and gives us an idea that stone age folks living in Arctic regions had boats ~ so why not their stone age cousins living in tropical paradises? Were they perhaps too stupid to build them?

[muawiyah]

KLINKERBUILT

[muawiyah]

If it’s written down it is “history”. This is not an “oral history” but one carved in stone. Pretty advanced thinking if you ask me.

[JoeProBono]

[Paine in the Neck]

A more realistic date of 7,500 takes you back before those sources and gives us an idea that stone age folks living in Arctic regions had boats

If they were clinker built and 7500 years old that would imply that boats of some sort pre-existed these by quite a long time. Clinker built boats are something that would have taken a long time to evolve. If we allow several thousand years to go from a log or a skin raft to such a craft then we have to backtrack the receding ice sheets to find where suitable trees were. Perhaps back to sw France, nw Spain, i.e. Solutrean country?

[Paine in the Neck]

...the first such boats were just moose hides stretched over a wooden frame, with the moose heads left on...

Interesting. I'll look into that.

[Miss Behave]

Very cool. Thanks for posting.

[muawiyah]

How about North Africa circa 20,000 BC, the very height of the glacial advance. Although we know people were living in the Refugia BEFORE THAT period and AFTER THAT period we don't really know if they were there from about 24,000 years ago to about 18,000 years ago ~ they could have gotten in their little boats and gone to America for all we know, skirting the then advancing great sea ice ice sheet.

Note, that deals with the question of just how far South the sea ice went ~ at the Peak it probably went a long way, but that period was short enough it probably didn't leave us with enough debris to actually detect it on the seabed.

The Australians are telling us folks had real boats 50,000 years ago. My thinking is that folks could make passable dugouts from the time they learned to set fire on demand. That'd be 180,000 years ago ~ maybe more.

Clinkerbuilt boats, though ~ are Post Glacial Advance ~ even 700 BC there were folks using large leather bottomed boats ~ they sailed from Northern Spain to sites in the Mediterranean, and back.

[muawiyah]

How about North Africa circa 20,000 BC, the very height of the glacial advance. Although we know people were living in the Refugia BEFORE THAT period and AFTER THAT period we don't really know if they were there from about 24,000 years ago to about 18,000 years ago ~ they could have gotten in their little boats and gone to America for all we know, skirting the then advancing great sea ice ice sheet.

Note, that deals with the question of just how far South the sea ice went ~ at the Peak it probably went a long way, but that period was short enough it probably didn't leave us with enough debris to actually detect it on the seabed.

The Australians are telling us folks had real boats 50,000 years ago. My thinking is that folks could make passable dugouts from the time they learned to set fire on demand. That'd be 180,000 years ago ~ maybe more.

Clinkerbuilt boats, though ~ are Post Glacial Advance ~ even 700 BC there were folks using large leather bottomed boats ~ they sailed from Northern Spain to sites in the Mediterranean, and back.

[muawiyah]

THink of it this way. There was no boat building possible from 14,000 years ago (melt down of the Big ice0 until the first birch trees had time to grow, and to spread. Some botanist has the information on that but I'd guess it took at least 100 years for the birches to spread North from France all the way to the Arctic Circle (winds blow those seeds a long way ~ that's why they have a "wing').

So, right off the bat the first people into the Arctic would have had just about the easiest to use wood on Earth. You could make splits for weaving baskets, larger splints for snowshoes, even larger splints for skis, and if you can make skis you can make planks and frames, and if you can do that you have your basic Sa'ami civilization ~ explaining several reasons it was highly successful in one of the world's worst climates.

Baskets, snowshoes, skis, boats ~ it's all there, and right on the heels of the big meltdown.

[SunkenCiv]

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Thanks Renfield. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.