Chukchi family from Siberia
The Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth's geological history. These continued for a million years and are considered the likely cause of the "Great Dying" about 250 million years ago, which is estimated to have killed 90% of species existing at the time.
At least three species of humans lived in Southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago: H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, and the Denisovans. The last was determined in 2010 by DNA evidence to be a new species.
Map of Russian federal subjects belonging to Siberia.
Siberia was inhabited by different groups of nomads such as the Enets, the Nenets, the Huns, the Scythians and the Uyghurs. The Khan of Sibir in the vicinity of modern Tobolsk was known as a prominent figure who endorsed Kubrat as Khagan in Avaria in 630. The Mongols conquered a large part of this area early in the 13th century. With the breakup of the Golden Horde, the autonomous Siberia Khanate was established in the late 15th century. Turkic-speaking Yakuts migrated north from the Lake Baikal region under pressure from the Mongol tribes during the 13th to 15th century. Siberia remained a sparsely populated area. Historian John F. Richards wrote: "... it is doubtful that the total early modern Siberian population exceeded 300,000 persons."
The growing power of Russia in the West began to undermine the Siberian Khanate in the 16th century. First, groups of traders and Cossacks began to enter the area, and then the Russian army began to set up forts farther and farther east. Towns such as Mangazeya, Tara, Yeniseysk and Tobolsk were developed, the last being declared the capital of Siberia. At this time, Sibir was the name of a fortress at Qashlik, near Tobolsk. Gerardus Mercator in a map published in 1595 marks Sibier both as the name of a settlement and of the surrounding territory along a left tributary of the Ob. Other sources contend that the Xibe, an indigenous Tungusic people, offered fierce resistance to Russian expansion beyond the Urals, and that Siberia is a Russification of their ethnonym.
By the mid-17th century, areas controlled by Russia had been extended to the Pacific. There were some 230,000 Russians in Siberia by 1709.
The tower of a 17th-century ostrog fort in Yakutsk
The first great modern change in Siberia was the Trans-Siberian Railway, constructed during 1891–1916. It linked Siberia more closely to the rapidly industrialising Russia of Nicholas II. Around seven million people moved to Siberia from European Russia between 1801 and 1914. From 1859 to 1917, over half a million people migrated to the Russian Far East. Siberia has extensive natural resources. During the 20th century, large-scale exploitation of these was developed, and industrial towns cropped up throughout the region.
At 7:15 a.m. on 30 June 1908, millions of trees were felled near the Podkamennaya Tunguska (Stony Tunguska) River in central Siberia in the Tunguska Event, which most scientists believe to have been the air burst of a meteoroid or a comet. Even though no crater has ever been found, the landscape in the (uninhabited) area still bears the scars of this event.
Belukha Mountain
In the early decades of the Soviet Union (especially the 1930s and 1940s), the earlier katorga system of penal labour camps was replaced by a new one that was controlled by the GULAG state agency. According to semi-official Soviet estimates that were not made public in Soviet times, from 1929 to 1953 more than 14 million people passed through these camps and prisons, many of which were in Siberia. A further seven to eight million were internally deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including entire nationalities in several cases). 516,841 prisoners died in camps from 1941 to 1943 due to food shortages caused by World War II. At other periods, mortality was comparatively lower.
The size, scope, and scale of the GULAG slave labour camps remains a subject of much research and debate. Many Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of northeastern Siberia. The best known clusters are Sevvostlag (The North-East Camps) along the Kolyma River and Norillag near Norilsk, where 69,000 prisoners were kept in 1952. Major industrial cities of Northern Siberia, such as Norilsk and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.
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