МАЭ № 6080-13

Bronze Age man from Khaptsigay (Irkutsk Region)

circa 1939

plaster

In 1929, Alexei Okladnikov excavated a Bronze Age (early Glazkovo stage) cemetery at Khaptsigay, Irkutsk Province, Baikal area, upper Lena River. Mikhail Gerasimov, too, had excavated the Baikal cemeteries and corrected Okladnikov’s chronological classification of the Baikal Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. Specifically, he argued that the Glazkovo stages is earlier than the Kitoy stage. The Kitoy group was markedly Mongoloid whereas the Glazkovo group shows a distinct Caucasoid tendency. Modern dating techniques such as radiocarbon analysis have demonstrated that Gerasimov was right. The Kitoy people––apparently migrants from the area east of Lake Baikal––turned out to be the earliest group (7th –6th millennia BC) while the Glazkovo people lived much later (3d–2nd millennia BC). If so, then the lesser expression of Mongoloid features in the Glazkovo people was caused by Caucasoid admixture introduced from more western areas of Western Siberia rather than by evolutionary conservatism, contrary to a widely held view. The ancestry of the Khaptsigay man may have been mixed, including both Mongoloids and Caucasoids.

Anthropological plastic reconstructions, lifetime masks. 19th - 20th centuries