Free Republic

Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin is tarnished as a result of Russia’s unprovoked invasion and occupation of Ukraine. Xi has been distancing China from Putin’s predations gradually — out of deference to his two biggest customers, the United States and European Union. But on Sept. 15 his displeasure about the war became public. Putin himself admitted at a press conference following a meeting with Xi that China had “concerns” about his war in Ukraine. So did India. But there is one more elephant in the room: Siberia, a region bigger and richer than any place...

They remain one of the most elusive groups of humans to have walked on earth. Evidence from the DNA traces left by Denisovans shows they lived on the Tibetan plateau, ­probably ­travelled to the Philippines and Laos in south Asia and might have made their way to northern China more than 100,000 years ago. They also interbred with modern humans...Their DNA, which was first found in samples from the Denisova cave in Siberia in 2010, provides most of our ­information about their existence.But recently scientists have pinpointed a strong candidate for the species to which the Denisovans might have belonged....

Piers Morgan Uncensored is joined by former oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was imprisoned in Russia for a decade, to discuss the death of Vladimir Putin's opponent Alexei Navalny, Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson, plus he issues a chilling warning to the West. Speaking exclusively to Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, Mikhail Khodorkovsky said the Russian leader would have no qualms attacking a NATO country if he was legitimised following the next Russian elections. He also discusses whether he fears for his life after making an enemy of Putin and if he thinks he will ever return to his homeland....

It’s the elephant in the room when you look at a map of Eurasia. Russia has 11% of the world’s land that is suitable for agriculture. China, with a vastly larger population, has only 7%. There are already numerous Chinese farmers in Russia. And then there is the matter of all those natural resources, in particular, timber, for those seemingly limitless forests. The documentary shows the modern machinery that Chinese firms are using to harvest all that timber.

Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has been tracked down to a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, his spokeswoman said on Monday, after supporters lost touch with him for more than two weeks, Reuters reports. Navalny, 47, was tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,900 km north east of Moscow, spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said. Navalny's lawyer managed to see him on Monday, she added. "This prison will be much worse than the one that was before," Yarmysh told Reuters. "They are trying to make his life as unbearable as it...

Archaeologists Have Uncovered a Pyramid Belonging to the Scythian-saka Period in the Karaganda Region of Kazakhstan.The pyramid is located on a hill overlooking the Taldy River in the Shet district of Karaganda, which was excavated by archaeologists from Karaganda University over a period of 4 excavation seasons.According to the researchers, the pyramid is a mausoleum complex for a ruler from the Begazı Dandibay culture, a late Bronze Age culture that flourished during the last phase of the Andronovo period (2000–1150 BC).The structure is a pyramidal stepped mausoleum, which was constructed in a region of the Sari Arka steppes where communities...

A recent DNA research on the bones of a boy who lived along the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia shows... that Native Americans share much of their genetic material with Middle Easterners and Europeans...Published in the journal Nature, the study of the genome of the boy, who lived twenty-four thousand years ago, shows that fully one-third of his DNA was from West Eurasian peoples linked to the Middle East and Europe....The study... could help clear up some long-standing mysteries regarding... some genetic singularities.Co-author and ancient DNA specialist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen states "these results were a...

Scientists discovered a female microscopic roundworm that has been stuck deep in Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years, The Washington Post reported. When they revived it, the worm started having babies via a process called parthenogenesis, which doesn't require a mate. According to a press release, the worm spent thousands of years in a type of dormancy called cryptobiosis. In that state, which can last almost indefinitely, all metabolic processes pause, including "reproduction, development, and repair," the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa reported. In a study published Thursday in the journal PLOS Genetics, scientists reported that after sequencing the worm's genome,...

Archaeologists in Siberia have discovered the untouched 3,000-year-old grave of a person thought to be a charioteer — indicating for the first time that horse-drawn chariots were used in the region.The skeletal remains were interred with a distinctive hooked metal attachment for a belt, which allowed drivers of horse-drawn chariots to tie their reins to their waists and free their hands. This type of artifact has also been found in Chinese and Mongolian graves.Aleksey Timoshchenko, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email that the object was...

Japan was the first country to break its silence after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. Tokyo said of the Kuril Islands that it was “completely unacceptable that the Northern Territories have yet to be returned since the Soviet Union’s illegal occupation of them 77 years ago”. That annexation saw the expulsion of Japanese people from the southern islands, and since then, the countries have failed to reach a compromise. Talks broke down when Putin showed he was not willing to share lands but only to gain new ones. Then China started drawing maps marking part of Siberia and...

Ancient Deer Tooth Pendant - The pierced deer tooth pendant. (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) A pendant made from a deer's tooth has turned out to be a veritable locket of genetic information left by an ancient woman who lived in Siberia some 20,000 years ago. Evolutionary anthropologists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany found a way to safely probe ancient artifacts for environmental DNA without destroying them, and applied it to a piece of jewelery found in the famous Denisova Cave in Russia in 2019. Other than the fragments of her chromosomes, no trace of the woman...

"China, India, Brazil and several other states close to Russia have unexpectedly voted for a UN Resolution which strongly censures Moscow. "On April 26, China unexpectedly voted in favor of a UN resolution that acknowledges Russia's military aggression against Ukraine and emphasizes the need to respect the independence and territorial integrity of all states... "...Recognizing also that the unprecedented challenges now facing Europe following the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, and against Georgia prior to that, and the cessation of the membership of the Russian Federation in the Council of Europe, call for strengthened cooperation between the United...

Separately at least one preserved carcass of a cave bear cub found on the mainland of Yakutia, with scientists hopeful of obtaining its DNA. More details of the finds are to be announced soon. Until now only the bones of cave bears have been discovered. The new finds are of ‘world importance’, according to one of Russia’s leading experts on extinct Ice Age species. Scientist Lena Grigorieva said of the island discovery of the adult beast: 'Today this is the first and only find of its kind - a whole bear carcass with soft tissues. 'It is completely preserved, with...

Frozen bear mouth The frozen bear came with its teeth well preserved. (NEFU) An adult bear recovered from the Siberian permafrost in the Lyakhovsky Islands in 2020 is not, as originally thought, around 30,000 years old. In fact, its age is more in the region of 3,500 years old. That's the verdict of researchers from the North-Eastern Federal University in Russia, who carried out a new necropsy of the well-preserved specimen. It remains an incredible find, offering an intriguing window into a past that isn't quite as far back as presumed. Initially, the team thought they were dealing with a...

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s dreams of resurrecting the Soviet Union could actually be going quite the opposite direction with the majority of inhabitants of five of the Federation’s regions supporting the idea of breaking away and proclaiming independence According to the survey, 72.1 percent of respondees in the Kaliningrad oblast want to break away from the Russian Federation. In Ingria, 66.2 percent of respondees wanted their oblast to gain independence. In Ural, the percentage amounted to 68.2 percent, in Syberia to 63.9 percent, and in the Kuban oblast to 55.7 percent.

‘Moscow takes a lot of resources from Siberia, and spends the money on its own needs and wars of aggression,’ said one secessionist leader February 16, 2023 4:36 pm (Updated February 17, 2023 9:04 am) Russians began voting in unauthorised independence referendums in five regions of the country on Thursday, as part of a campaign to promote secession from Moscow’s rule. The online vote organized by umbrella group the Post-Russia Forum covers Siberia, the Urals, Kaliningrad, Krasnodar and Ingria. The referendums are not binding, and may be illegal under a law against challenging Russia’s “territorial integrity”. But more than 130,000...

Footage captured the shocking moment an angry camel fatally trampled a man who punched it at a children’s camp in Russia. “The animal did not appreciate such treatment,” local media reported regarding the deadly incident, which occurred last month at the Beryozka recreation centre in Omsk, Siberia, per East2West news. The fiasco occurred after a watchman named Yury, 51, struck the dromedary while attempting to move it, causing it to become enraged and attack him, local media reported. In the disturbing footage, the guard can be seen walking up to the double-humped Bactrian camel — which can weigh over 1,100...

Besides a clear, cool stream, a solitary shelter stood. Blackened by weather and time, the structure was piled high on all sides with rubbish. If not for a window the size of a shoe box, it would have been impossible to imagine that people lived inside. But they did. And the arrival of outsiders had been noticed. The year was 1978. The low-hanging door creaked slowly open, and an aged man emerged into the sharp light. To the visitors, he appeared as a character of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Barefoot, he wore a patchwork shirt made of sacking with...

A genetic analysis of a 45,000-year-old thigh bone narrows down the time when modern humans and Neanderthals first interbred.A 45,000-year-old leg bone is raising questions about just how close modern-day humans are to our thick-browed Stone Age ancestors. DNA from the femur of a Siberian man is helping to pinpoint when modern humans and Neanderthals first interbred, researchers say. But what does this mean for the human connection to a species that disappeared nearly 30,000 years ago? The thigh bone, spotted six years ago on the banks of the Irtysh River in Siberia by a Russian artist who carves jewelry...

While bulldozing land for a new burial ground, workers startled to discover an old one, belonging to a newly identified culture.All they meant to do is expand a local cemetery. But as gravediggers in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, were removing a hill to make room for the newly deceased in 2018, they made an unexpected discovery. That hill turned out to be an ancient burial mound created by a Scythian-type culture over 2,000 years ago.The question is which Scythian-type culture.Our story begins in the 19th century, when a new cemetery called Shinnoye was established on the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk, the second biggest...