Diring Yuriakh is a somewhat controversial early hominid site located at the confluence of Diring Yuriakh creek and river Lena, about 140 km south of Yakutsk in Siberia. It is believed to have been occupied around 300,000 years ago, with an Oldowan-like pebble tool assemblage.
Four thousand stone artifacts have been found at Diring Yuriakh, most of which are cores and unmodified quartzite debitage. However, a few tools from the assemblage include unifacial pebble choppers, flake-and-core tools, hammerstones, and anvils, similar to collections found in east Africa. They were recovered from a single buried surface, which has been TL dated to >260,000 years ago, with likely dates between 270,000 to 370,000 years ago.
Controversy at Diring Yuriakh
Two lines of controversy are from the site: the site context and the artifact assemblage. Scholars are somewhat divided, but there is scholarly support for both the context (deflated by eolian processes into its current location) as appropriately dated and the artifact assemblage as human-made (if so, probably Homo erectus). The date is still questioned by numerous scholars because of its singularity—that is to say, Diring Yuriakh at the moment is the only moderately well accepted site of its age within thousands of miles, not to mention thousands of years, and that alone is reason for skepticism.
The original excavator Yuri Mochanov has argued for an age of between 1.8 and 3.2 million years old, based (primarily) on the technological comparison to Oldowan assemblages. The thermoluminescence dates, much younger but still at least 260,000 years old, are still quite astonishing, more than 60,000 years older than any other archaeological site in Siberia.
Two other sites in Siberia (Ulalinka and Mokhovo I) have flaked stone assemblages thought to date to this period, but they are both disputed, both on chronology and on the identification of the artifacts as human-made. After Diring Yuriakh, the earliest accepted Siberian occupations are Middle Paleolithic sites younger than 200,000 years.
If the chronology for Diring Yuriakh continues to hold up—as of 2010 there are no other dates except the TL—it suggests that Lower Paleolithic occupations in Siberia, if they occurred at all, were very rare indeed.
Archaeological Research at Diring Yuriakh
Diring Yuriakh was excavated over a 15-year period by Yuri Mochanov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Sources
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to the Lower Paleolithic and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Carlson RL. 2001. Diring Yuriakh: An early Palaeoloithic site on the Lena River, Eastern Siberia. Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin 21:132-137.
Dolukhanov P. 2008. Peopling of Siberia. p 1994-2001 in: Pearsall DM, editor. Encyclopedia of Archaeology. London: Elsevier Inc.
Huntley DJ, and Richards MP. 1997. The age of the Diring Yuriakh archaeological site. Ancient Thermoluminescence 15(2-3):48-49.
Kuzmin YV, and Krivonogov SK. 1999. More about Diring Yuriakh: Unsolved geoarchaeological problems at a "lower paleolithic" site in central Siberia. Geoarchaeology 14(4):351-359.
Waters MR, Forman SL, and Pierson JM. 1999. A comment on "More about Diring Yuriakh: Unsolved geoarchaeological problems at a "lower paleolithic" site in central Siberia." Geoarchaeology 14(4): 361 - 364.
Waters MR, Forman SL, and Pierson JM. 1999. Late Quaternary Geology and Geochronology of Diring Yuriakh, An Early Paleolithic Site in Central Siberia. Quaternary Research 51(2):195-211.
Waters MR, Forman SL, and Pierson JM. 1997. The age of the Diring Yuriakh archaeological site: reply to Huntley and Richards. Ancient Thermoluminescence 15(2-3):50-51.
Waters MR, Forman SL, and Pierson JM. 1997. Diring Yuriakh: A Lower Paleolithic Site in Central Siberia. Science 275(5304):1281-1284.
