Prehistory of Siberia 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. Unlike Europe and the Near East, this event did not mark a major change in lifestyle, economy or culture. The prehistoric inhabitants of the vast areas of taiga and tundra east of the Yenissei and north of Baikal differ in many ways from the prehistoric cultures of the other parts of north Asia. There is stronger evidence than usual for settlement continuity here
History of Siberia Hansteen and Georg Adolf Erman were the most important step in the exploration of the territory. Alexander von Humboldt, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, and Gustav Rose also paid short visits to Siberia, which gave a new impulse to the accumulation of scientific knowledge; while Carl Ritter elaborated in his "Asien" (1832–1859) the foundations of a sound knowledge of the structure of Siberia. Aleksandr Fyodorovich Middendorf's journey (1843–1845) to north-eastern Siberia—contemporaneous with Matthias Castrén's journeys for the special study of the Ural-Altaic languages—directed attention to the far north and awakened interest in the Amur, the basin of which soon became the scene