Pre-Mongolian — till 13th century (though, in fact, Mongols have conquered only southern and western parts of Siberia: North and East remained untouched till the middle of 17th century when their lands were annexed after some Cossack expeditions). In fact, we know for sure only about the situation from 17th century on.
The steppes of Siberia were occupied by a succession of nomadic peoples, including the Khitan people, various Turkic peoples, and the Mongol Empire. In the Late Middle Ages, Tibetan Buddhism spread into the areas south of Lake Baikal. During the Russian Empire, Siberia was chiefly developed as an agricultural province.
Siberia entered the flow of Russian history relatively late, at the end of the sixteenth century. The official Russian incursion into Siberia dates to 1581, when the Cossack hetman Ermak Timofeevich led a detachment across the Ural Mountains and soon after defeated the forces of the Khanate of Sibir'.
It has formed part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its various predecessor states since the centuries-long conquest of Siberia, which began with the fall of the Khanate of Sibir in the late 16th century and concluded with the annexation of Chukotka in 1778.
The Amur Annexation was the annexation of the southeast corner of Siberia by the Russian Empire in 1858–1860 through a series of unequal treaties forced upon the Qing dynasty of China.
As a result, China lost the region that came to be known as Russian Manchuria (an area of 350,000 square miles (910,000 km2)) and access to the Sea of Japan. In the wake of these events, the Qing government changed course and encouraged Han Chinese migration to Manchuria (Chuang Guandong).
The core ideological justification for Russian expansion into Siberia stemmed from the interpretation that the legal incorporation of the Khanate of Sibir into the Russian realm gave Russia legal sovereignty over the entirety of the territory stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean to the east.
The earliest indigenous peoples of Siberia were hunter-gatherers distantly related to modern Europeans, and diverged from a shared ancestral population around 38kya before populating Siberia.
Before Russian colonization began in the late 16th century, Siberia was inhabited by a large number of small ethnic groups whose members subsisted either as hunter-gatherers or as pastoral nomads relying on domestic reindeer. The largest of these groups, however, the Sakha (Yakut), raised cattle and horses.
Western Siberians trace 57% of their ancestry to ancient North Eurasians, represented by the 24,000-yr-old Siberian Mal'ta boy MA-1. Eastern Siberian populations formed a distinct sublineage that separated from other East Asian populations ∼10,000 yr ago.
Mongolic speakers (the Buryat) occupied an area south of Lake Baikal. To the west, Turkic speakers came to dominate south-central Siberia, giving rise to the modern Khakas, Altai, Shor, Tuvan, and Tofa languages.
Mongols Go West
In the 1230s, they began to head west, eyeing territory in Eastern Europe. Batu, another grandson of Genghis Khan, expanded Mongol rule to modern-day western Russia, Ukraine, and all the way up to the Carpathian Mountains. In the east, Batu extended Mongol territory to Siberia.
How many people live in Siberia? Although Siberia is 77% of Russia, it has only 27% of its population – a bit less than 40 million people. Living conditions in Siberia are pretty tough and many young people often move to other parts of Russia or abroad, so the population is expected to gradually decrease.
The Imperial Japanese Army continued to occupy Siberia even after other Allied forces withdrew in 1920. Allied commanders of the Siberian intervention. Front row: William S. Graves (3rd), Otani Kikuzo (4th) and Yui Mitsue (5th).
The fugitive party included three Polish soldiers, a Latvian landowner, a Lithuanian architect, and an enigmatic US metro engineer called "Mr. Smith"; they were later joined by a 17-year-old Polish girl, Kristina. They journeyed from Siberia to India crossing the Gobi Desert and Himalayas.
While the story of Homo sapiens begins about 2.5 million years ago in sunny Africa, there has been no evidence that early humans ventured into bitter subarctic regions, such as northern Siberia, until at most 30,000 years ago.
Because there is a lot of forests, there is a lot of timber. Siberia also has natural gas, oil and different minerals. These natural resources create jobs, giving people reasons to stay in Siberia. The two major challenges of living in Siberia are the huge distances and extreme cold.
Siberiak religion is a mixture of Christianity, Slavic folk beliefs, and Siberian native shamanism. Focus is on spirit helpers and the power of icons and miracle-working saints such as the healer Saint Nicholas.
The Palaeolithic and Mesolithic inhabitants of Siberia were hunter-gatherers, whose prey consisted of mammoths and reindeer, and occasionally fish as well. In the 6th millennium BC, pottery spread across the whole of Siberia, which scholars treat as the beginning of the Siberian neolithic.
As sub-ethnic group
The dialects of the Siberians were formed mainly on the basis of Northern Russian dialects. Ideologies of Siberian regionalism (Siberian nationalism) considered the Siberians to be a separate people from the Russians.
The pre-Columbian settlers of the New World, who gave rise to the present-day Native Americans, are commonly believed to have come from Siberia, through the Bering land bridge, in the period 30,000–12,000 years before present (ybp).
One fact is that the Vikings, who travelled across the White Sea travelled deep into present-day Russia along the rivers Onega, Northern Dvina and Mesen. Even as remote, as via the rivers Pechora, Ob and Irtysh in north-western Siberia.
Stalin wanted to destroy eastern Poland and absorb it into the Soviet Union, so he confiscated land, property and businesses, and deported over 1.5 million Polish people to slave labour camps in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the Arctic Circle. Many died because of appalling conditions during the journeys and at the camps.
In Russia all the northern provinces, from the Norwegian frontier to the Ural Mountains are only known superficially; we know here only the coast and the three principal rivers—the Onega, the Dwina, and the Petchora. The great Samoyede tundra remains quite unexplored.
The region then became an important resource extraction and production base as the Russian Empire gave way to the Soviet Union, which began a full-scale process of industrialization. It was under the leadership of Stalin that one-industry towns such as Magnitogorsk, Norilsk and Zlatoust began to appear in Siberia.