People who lived in central Siberia thousands of years ago enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle despite the area’s cold winters. They fished abundant pike and salmonids from the Amnya River and hunted migrating elk and reindeer with bone and stonetipped spears. To preserve their rich stores of fish oil and meat, they created elaborately decorated pottery. And they built the world’s first known fortresses, perhaps to keep out aggressive neighbors.
With room inside for dozens of people and dwellings sunk almost 2 meters deep for warmth in Siberian winters, the fortresses were ringed by earthen walls several meters high and topped with wooden palisades. At some point, they were consumed by flame, a possible sign of early battles. And at least one set of structures was built startlingly early: 8000 years ago, 2000 years before the mighty walls of Uruk and Babylon in the Middle East and thousands of years before agriculture reached some parts of Europe and Asia, according to a study to be reported in Antiquity on 1 December.
That early date and the fact that hunter-gatherers built the structures add to the growing evidence challenging the textbook view that permanent settlements—and walls to protect them—could only arise after the dawn of agriculture. “To many people, this still is not part of what hunter-gatherers are. … There’s still an element in archaeology that believes complexity develops over time,” says University of Oxford archaeologist Rick Schulting, who was not part of the research. “This is a nice study that demonstrates you can have alternate pathways to complexity.”
The discoveries deep in Siberia are part of a wider re-evaluation of how complex societies arose. Predictable harvests and storable surpluses were needed, traditional thinking went, to support large sedentary populations, monumental architecture, and stratified societies—all of which made up what archaeologists called the Neolithic package. “If you found something like this in the Near East, as part of a farming society, it wouldn’t be a surprise,” says co-author and Free University of Berlin archaeologist Henny Piezonka.
In recent years archaeologists had documented dozens of fortified settlements in central Siberia, an expanse of pine forest crisscrossed by rivers and pocked with permafrost and swamps, more than 2500 kilometers east of Moscow. Researchers generally assumed the forts were beyond the capabilities of Stone Age foragers and thus only a few thousand years old at most, dating from after metal tools first appeared in the region. “Hunter-gatherers are still seen as simple people who had no impact on their environment,” says Free University Berlin archaeologist Tanja Schreiber, a co-author of the new study.
One fort sits on a high spit of land overlooking a bend in the Amnya. In 2019, Piezonka and a team of Russian and German researchers visited the site, days by boat and helicopter from the nearest city. They documented the defensive architecture, a network of deep ditches, banks, and palisades surrounding a cluster of houses. They also collected wood and charcoal from the settlement’s lowest, and therefore earliest, layers, which were visible as bands of black organic material in the promontory’s white sand. “It’s like they’re drawn with a ruler,” Piezonka says.
Radiocarbon dating showed the site’s earliest walls and houses were built around 6000 B.C.E. At that time, local people lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants—a lifestyle still partially practiced by Nenets and Khanty people in the area today.
The Siberian findings add to others that challenge agriculture’s primacy in driving settlements and cultural complexity. In Anatolia, the monumental religious structures of Gobekli Tepe were built even earlier, at 9000 years B.C.E. But those people were beginning a transition to agriculture. In contrast, beginning about 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer societies in coastal areas around the world, including the Korean peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, and later Scandinavia, drew on marine resources to support large settlements. More recently, complex, hierarchical societies on the northwest coast of North America lived in large, permanent, and sometimes fortified settlements, all sustained by hunting, gathering, and fishing.
Yet North American societies like the Kwakwaka’wakw, Coast Salish, and Tlingit were seen as outliers on an evolutionary ladder that led from foraging to farming to complex states and the origins of modern society. “The Pacific Coast is always seen as an exception, not as evidence of another spectrum of diversity,” Piezonka says.
That view of the past as a standardized progression has begun to change, a shift captured in the 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber. “We can now see there are many societies in the archaeological record who are hunter-gatherers but have many of the features we traditionally assumed were associated with farmers,” says University of Cambridge archaeologist Graeme Barker.
In Siberia, the abundant resources provided by the taiga may help explain the complexity reflected in the forts. Annual fish runs yielded dried fish, fish oil, and fish meal—all high-calorie, long-lasting foods. Reindeer, elk, and waterfowl migrations presented predictable opportunities to harvest still more meat to smoke and store for the long winter. “They don’t have to grow or raise resources,” Piezonka says. “The surrounding environment provides them seasonally. It’s like harvesting nature.”
At the Amnya site, she and her colleagues recovered dozens of decorated clay pots with pointed and flat bottoms from the earliest layers of the pit houses, where they were presumably used to store the abundant food. Once thought to be part of the Neolithic package, pottery may not be exclusive to farmers: East Asian hunter-gatherer cultures began to make pots during the last ice age. “Pottery and forts are like an alternative Neolithic package,” Piezonka says. At Amnya, her team also noted a possible sign of social stratification, another development often linked to agriculture: a cluster of houses that sat, undefended, outside the palisade.
The fortified settlements, often situated overlooking rivers, might have been ways to stake out productive fishing spots. “When you start to get large numbers of people and storage of resources, you start to get into the world of competition,” Barker says. “Part of that is going and taking.”
A centurieslong cold spell that started about 8200 years ago may have made such rich sites particularly desirable. At Amnya and other fortified settlements, burned layers show that pit houses and palisades were periodically consumed by flames, and archaeologists found arrowheads in the Amnya’s outer ditch—possible signs of violent conflict. “These things we think about now, like property ownership and social inequality—people have been thinking about since we became human,” Colin Grier of Washington State University says.
Source : Science