Possible Evidence of Ancient Bear Cult in Siberia

From The International Business Times

2,000-Year-Old Bear Ring Found In Siberia, Used In Ancient ‘Bear Cult’

By Zoe Mintz

on August 27 2013 8:59 PM

 

 

A Russian student has made a rare discovery in Siberia.

Alexander Korchagin, a student at Novosibirsk State University, discovered a 2,000-year-old bronze ring that may have belonged to an ancient tribe that saw polar bears as sacred animals, the Siberian Times reports.

“The ring is tiny in diameter so even a young girl, let alone a woman, cannot wear it. We concluded that it was used in a ritual connected with a bear cult and was put on the bear claw,” said archaeologist Andrey Gusev, from the Scientific Research Centre of the Arctic in Salekhard.

 

The ring was found during an excavation at Ust-Polui, an ancient sanctuary in Salekhard that sits on a bank of the Polui River, not far from the confluence with the Ob River. Since 1932, excavations have taken place at the site, which is believed to have functioned as a spiritual center since the first century B.C.

“Ust-Polui is rich in such objects. More than this, many of them have genuine artistic value and help us understand something about the beliefs of these ancient inhabitants. This is the case with this ring showing the head and paws of a bear, which we have found this year,” Gusev said.

While the Khanty tribes left no written evidence for their existence, the ring’s discovery may help fill in the gaps on how the ancient tribe lived.

“After killing the bear they had a bear festival to honor the animal's memory,” Gusev said. “The head and front paws of the bear was adorned with a handkerchief, rings, and left lying a few days in the house. This combination of images on the ring and the fact that it was found in the sanctuary of Ust-Polui led us to believe that there was also practiced a bear cult.”

This isn’t the first relic uncovered at the site. This past year archaeologists unearthed a bird with a mask on its chest and a pendant showing a furry animal biting a bird -- both made from bronze.
Natalia Fedorova, a senior fellow from the Center for the Study of the Arctic, says the remote location functioned as an “intertribal sacred place” in the first century BC.

"It was located on the crossroads of the natural zones and the cultural traditions,” Fedorova said.  While meeting there during the sacred ceremonies the people from various territories of the Ob region exchanged knowledge, technology and cultural achievements, in these meetings they created new cycles of magic legends and epic tales, the motifs of which inspired the ancient artists.”
Yearly excavations have taken place at the site since 2006 and are scheduled to continue until 2015.

More photos and a biography of the article's author at the original link. 

Evidence of Possible Dorset Culture Bear Cult

Way cool!  Shades of Shardik...  This is a long article, settle in with a coffee.  It's a sort of overview of the discoveries of Jorgen Meldgaard in NE Canada during the 1950's-'60's. 

Mysterious bear figurines baffle archaeologists

October 18, 2012 - 06:17

 

Small bear figurines have led researchers on the trail of hitherto unknown pre-Inuit rituals, indicating that these people practiced a bear cult.

 

By Ditte Svane-Knudsen

 

the 1950s, the now deceased Danish archaeologist Jørgen Meldgaard made a mysterious discovery in northeastern Canada:

 

A small, headless bear figurine, carved from a walrus tusk, was lying leaning up against the back wall of a stone fireplace in an old settlement. The bear had been positioned in a way that made it look as though it was ‘diving’ into the fireplace.

 

At the time, this little figurine didn’t cause much of a stir. It was just one out of a long series of discoveries that Meldgaard made during his field trips to the Igloolik region of Arctic Canada and Greenland in the 1950s and 1960s.

 

But when researchers at the Danish National Museum recently gained access to Meldgaard’s surviving diaries, records and photos, they realised that the discovery of the bear figurine was indeed quite sensational.

Humans and animals were close

Their examination of the material revealed that the small bear figurine could be an important key to understanding how people from more than 1,000 years ago viewed the relationship between animals and humans.

 

”The figurine provides us with information about some previously unknown 1,000-year-old rituals, which suggest that the Pre-Inuit, also known as the Dorset people, imagined that humans were related to certain animals in a way that’s very far from what we would imagine in today’s Western world,” says Ulla Odgaard, a senior researcher at the National Museum.

 

“Apparently, the Dorset people in Greenland and Canada didn’t see any antagonism between humans and animals,” she adds.

 

“Humans were not superior to animals; rather, it was a symbiotic co-existence. Bears and other animals functioned as mediators between mankind and the world of spirits.”

The Dorset way of thinking is also known from other early cultures

In other words, the finds reveal a belief in which animals – bears in particular – are our brothers, whose lives blend in with our own.

 

The way the Dorset culture viewed the relationship between humans and animals is known as animism – a phenomenon also known from other cultures.

 

“We know that the relationship between bears and humans has been crucial in all pre-modern cultures. This applies almost as far back in time as we can trace – all the way back to the very earliest renderings of the world that humans have created,” says Odgaard's colleague at the National Museum, Martin Appelt.

 

For instance, we see this relationship expressed in small carvings and cave paintings of humans and bears from the hunter-gatherer culture.

 

“Many cultures have combined human and animal features in their illustrations – e.g. a figurine of a bear with a falcon’s body, where the underside depicts a carved human head,” he says.  On many figurines from early cultures, the skeleton is cut so that it’s visible outside the body – and that’s also the case with Meldgaard’s bear figurine.

 

According to Appelt, this bears witness to a belief that the difference between humans and animals only lies in the skin they’re wearing, so to speak.

 

“So an animal is also a person – only with a different skin. And some of them have probably been regarded as spirits – i.e. people in a parallel universe to ours.”

The bear was something special

The apparent fact that bears were regarded as something special could be because the bear, along with man, is one of the few animals that were believed to transcend and travel between the worlds of land and sea.

 

Another explanation may be that humans and bears could change roles depending on the situation: sometimes it was the man who hunted the bear and sometimes it was vice versa.

The discovery of another bear was an eye opener

Meldgaard also found another bear figurine in a nearby settlement.  This bear stood upright with its head sticking up and the body half buried in the gravel.

 

Underneath it they found a fireplace, which suggests that this bear apparently was about to rise up from the fireplace.  The combination of both of the bear figurines’ interaction with the fireplaces led the Odgaard to believe that this could be a sign of rituals.

 

Carved bear figurines and the symbolism of rising and diving bears is also known in other parts of the world, for instance in Siberia, where resurrection rituals have been performed for millennia, says Odgaard.

 

Here, the bear was the mythical ancestor that every year travels to the upper world to secure the liberation of the animals’ souls, so that humans again can hunt them.

The fireplace was the gateway to other worlds

Legends from Siberia indicate that humans could communicate with the world of spirits through the fireplace. In other words, the fireplace may have been regarded as a gateway to other worlds. [Hmmm...sounds rather like the 'flue network' from the Harry Potter books...]

 

Bears are also known from Neolithic petroglyphs in Siberia and numerous finds of bear heads or headless bear figurines in the Arctic region. But none of these have been found in a ritual context like the two from Igloolik.

Bear figurines could explain lack of finds of burial sites

Since the ritual with fireplaces appears to stretch across time and space, the researchers believe the finds are of far greater importance than previously thought.

 

The bear figurines on the fireplaces are not only some of the few physical vestiges testifying to the Dorset culture’s view of life and death that archaeologist have ever come across.  The figurines may also help explain an old mystery – why archaeologists only rarely find burial sites from the earliest settlers in Greenland and Arctic Canada.

Dorset people may have dismembered their dead

Among the thousands of unique and spectacular objects that Jørgen
Meldgaard and his colleagues excavated in the Canadian settlements
in the 1950s and 60s, the many fine carvings made from walrus tusks,
reindeer antler and driftwood are particularly interesting to archaeologists.
These include small carvings of humans, human-like creatures and
various animals, but also figures which seem to contain traits from both
humans and animals. The figures reveal a belief in which animals – bears
in particular – are our brothers, whose lives blend in with ours.
(Photo: The National Museum of Denmark).

Although there’s no shortage of ancient Inuit tales about the special relationship between humans and animals, the oral sources tend to dry out once we start moving toward the millennia before the Inuit settled in Arctic Canada and Greenland.

 

“We have so far had glaringly few archaeological finds from pre-Inuit graves on other ritual elements that could increase our understanding of how the pre-Inuit people viewed their world,” says Appelt.

“This is where the bear figurines suddenly make many pieces fall into place. Suddenly we understand the many other figures with bear heads or headless bears in a completely different way.”

 

That the two bear figurines from the fireplaces have their skeletons carved on the outside of their bodies also confirms a suspicion the archaeologists have had that Dorset people probably dismembered their dead and scattered them out on the fields or sunk them in the sea, so they would end up as animal food – like we’re seeing in e.g. today’s Nepal and Tibet.

 

“This suspicion is compounded by the fact that the few bones we’ve actually found from the Dorset culture are not whole skeletons, but simple elements – a jaw, a thighbone, etc.  This suggests that the Dorset people had a completely different view of skeletons and bodies from what we have today – which the carvings of external skeletons on the bear figurines testify to.”

Rituals transcend space and time

Appelt says that the bear figurines from Igloolik are forcing archaeologists to think outside the box.

 

“We archaeologists prefer to work from the hypothesis that we can define various periods in history and that there is a clear division between space and time. But the figurines reveal that this is not the case here,” says Appelt.

 

“Some phenomena, such as animism and the rituals with the fireplaces and the dismemberment of the dead, transcend time and space – which is why you simply need to view them in bits of several 100,000 years if they are to be understood and make sense.”

Time and space not enough to understand the past

The archaeologist explains that when you look at archaeological finds across the world, there are so many overlaps where rituals transcend across cultures, time and space that there seems to be a connection.

 

"It’s very strange! And many archaeologists will surely find it unreasonable to think this way as an archaeologist – because how can things be connected in this way?” says Appelt.

 

”I don’t have the answer. There’s no answer book here. But I think the two headless bear figurines prove that it’s not always right to view history from within the narrow confines of time, space and traditions.

 

The next step for Odgaard, Appelt and their colleagues is to create an overview of Meldgaard’s records and publish the most important scientific findings.

 

Facts

 

The Dorset people in Greenland and Canada (c. 700 to 1,200 AD) is an archaeological term for a non-Inuit people group from Greenland.

The Dorset culture preceded the Inuit culture in Arctic North America. Archaeologists believe the people migrated from Siberia and Alaska between 4,000 years ago and until the birth of Christ.
Iniuit legends mention Tunitt (singular Tuniq) or Sivullirmiut (‘The first inhabitants’) as a people who were displaced by the Inuit.

Archaeologists, however, doubt whether or not the Inuit met with the Dorset culture, although there is a general consensus that the two groups have lived in the same area for a period.

Dorset culture became extinct around 1902 – probably as a result of a change in climate and living conditions, but also because they were ousted by the Inuit.

"Shardik" Come to Life?

Does anyone besides me remember this novel about a giant bear that people in the novel are convinced is either God or a very important messenger from God?  Shardik!

Without even finishing this article, that name instantly came to mind...

Article at Past Horizons
Sunday, March 18, 2012 

By: Hanne Jakobsen, ScienceNordic

Artefacts are usually displayed in museums but sometimes there are some that just can’t be put on exhibition – as is the case with one that is hidden deep in the Russian forests.

A partial shot of some of the 1,000 petroglyphs!

It was known that there were rock carvings on some islands in Lake Kanozero, and Jan Magne Gjerde, project manager at the Tromsø University Museum, went out there to document them as part of his doctoral work however, when he and his colleagues had completed their work, the number of known petroglyphs had risen from 200 to over 1,000.

“I still get chills up my spine when I talk about it because it was such an emotional experience finding these carvings,” says Gjerde. “No matter how much I explore over the next 50 years, chances are close to zero that I’ll ever find anything comparable.”

Join a 5,000-year-old bear hunt

In the summer of 2005, Gjerde drove more than 5,300 kilometres east to Lake Kanozero. Together with Russian colleagues he discovered what he calls some of the world’s oldest animated cartoons.
“Petroglyphs are found at four sites in the area − on three islands and on a stone block on the lakeshore. The oldest ones date to between 5,000 and 6,000 years old,” explains Gjerde. The main site is on the island of Kanozero.

According to Gjerde, these aren’t like the petroglyphs they are used to seeing, depicting one moose or one deer. These are fantastic cartoons presenting entire episodes. For example the one they found at the main site, which depicts a bear hunt.

He describes in detail a hunter who is heading uphill on skis and tracking a bear. The ski tracks are just as one would expect for someone going up a slope with a good distance between the strides. The hunter then gets his feet together, skis down a slope, stops, removes his skis, takes four steps – and plunges his spear into the bear.

“This is the oldest example of a cartoon petroglyph we know of, at least in Northern Europe, so it was utterly thrilling to get the chance to be part of this discovery,” he says.

Testifying to a rich society

Gjerde and his colleagues camped in a tent on Kanozero for ten days while documenting the discoveries. Time flies when you suddenly have to make ten times as many drawings as you expected.

They marked off the figures in chalk and then traced this onto plastic sheets, which could be brought back home and properly photographed and documented.

Rest of article.

All Polar Bears Today Traced to One Irish Female Bear!

This is absolutely fascinating news, and wouldn't you know it, ties in to a recently revived discussion about an ancient bone flute that started back in 2009.  First, here's the article:
Study: polar bears come from Ireland
Posted on 17 July 2011
from icenews.is

Despite their dwindling numbers, Arctic polar bears have come a long way over the years, originally descending from a single brown bear from Ireland, according to a new study.

DNA samples taken from polar bears from Greenland, Norway, Alaska and Russia proved that each individual’s lineage traced back to an Irish mama bear that lived 20,000 to 50,000 years ago.

The two different species also periodically mated during the last 100,000 years, according to the analysis of genetic indicators which are passed down through females. The revelation could help to quell the fears of scientists that cross-species mingling is a further threat to the Arctic bears than are struggling to cope with the effects of climate change.

In recent years, since the Arctic species have been pushed beyond their usual environment due to melting ice, several ‘pizzlies’ (a cross between polar and grizzly bears) have been spotted by researchers. Although it was known that polars evolved from a large family of brown bears 150,000 years ago, it was not known whether further inter-species mating had dramatically shaped the current gene pool. [I like 'grolar' bear better :)]

“Hybridisation could certainly result in the loss of unique genetic sequences, which could push them toward extinction,” Beth Shapiro, lead researcher and a Pennsylvania State University professor, told AFP. “But scientists should reconsider conservation efforts focused not just on polar bears but also on hybrids, since hybrids may play an underappreciated role in the survival of certain species,” she added.

A team of scientists analysed DNA passed from females to their offspring in 242 living and ancient bears. “We found that the matrilines of the polar bears coalesce to a relatively recent common ancestor” – one which lived along Ireland’s Atlantic shore – said the study’s co-author Daniel Bradley.

Now, here's the blog discussion about ancient flutes that devolved into discussion about a controversial ancient bone flute - made out of a bear's bone, discovered in Slovenia in 1995:

World's Oldest Flute? June 24, 2009

Remember "Clan of the Cave Bear" by Jean Auel?  I'm sure scientists shrank in horror from her popular novels about a "modern" young female raised by "Neanderthals," who bears a "cross-breed" child.  Lo and behold, many years later, traces of DNA found in a small percentgage of the overall modern population provide evidence that such "cross-breeding" did, indeed, occur!

Maybe Carlos has it right.  It was the ancient cave bear that most influenced the development of our ancient ancestors.

The Hind of Hinds - Continued

I want to relate a couple of very interesting "hallucinations" I had last night that are related to the material above and – well, you’ll see where this goes -- I’ve mentioned in earlier posts about how I tend to have hallucinatory "dreams" – not sure what to call the state, exactly, it tends to happens in that area where I’m half awake, or not quite asleep. Last night, or I should say, early this morning, it was between 2 and 3 a.m. when I am prone to wake up these days – anyway, I did my usual, wake up, roll over, look at the clock, roll back to settle into the pillows and I saw what, for the life of me, appeared to be the outline of a bear sitting in my wing chair by the south window. Now darlings, I knew it couldn’t possibly be a bear sitting in my chair, not at 2 in the morning, but it was quite distinctly the outline of a bear, even after I shook my head and blinked my eyes a couple of times and tried to "wake up." It was still there. I laid back down and watched it for awhile; it’s head was moving! It didn’t occur to me until I was having my morning coffee that it was moving in a barely perceptible nodding motion. I was totally stumped as to why this hallucination would not go away even though I thought I was almost fully awake; I fell back asleep – perhaps it was 10 minutes later while continuing to look at the "bear in the chair." It’s a bit hard to explain – this half-baked/half-awake thought process, but since the bear did NOT attack me, I KNEW it was an hallucination, not the real thing (forget about the logic of how a bear would happen to get into a locked house without any noise, happen to wander upstairs into my bedroom, and happen to sit in my chair quietly waiting for me to "wake" up), and so I wasn’t afraid to try and fall back asleep, only annoyed that whatever it was wouldn’t go away. As often happens in these post-menopausal times (women of a certain age in the audience will know exactly what I mean), I then proceeded to wake up about every 45 to 55 minutes for the next couple of hours – sometimes this happens until the alarm goes off at 6 a.m., but last night/early this morning it only happened two more times, and so I was able to get in a last couple of hours of "quality" sleep before the alarm went off. Anyway, when I next awoke, I turned my head and crinked my neck up just to get a look and sure enough, the bear was still sitting in the chair by the window on the south wall. Damn! And still ever so slightly nodding it’s head. I could see it distinctly because my south window overlooks a street light perhaps 50 feet away, and it casts enough light through the curtains to cast eerie shadows inside my bedroom (cue spooky music….) Hmmmmm. Then I rolled over toward the west wall and caught a glimpse of something that set my heart to pounding – a giant serpent! I nearly leaped out of bed -- Of course it wasn’t a giant serpent, it was my "pharmacy" style floor lamp that I have sitting next to the computer hutch, but to my half-awake eyes it took on the form of a gigantic hooded cobra. Hmmmm, a bear and a snake? Very weird. Someone must be trying to tell me something, I thought, as I settled back into my pillows and went back to sleep. OKAY! A bit of back story. The serpent I understand because for the past couple of weeks delion and I have been nattering back and forth about things Egyptian, etc. and I’ve been refreshing my memory by checking out information on Uadjet, the serpent tutorial Goddess of "Upper" (Southern) Egypt, very ancient, who also represents the Sun God (Ra/Re) and, in one of her aspects, is also His Sacred Eye. So the lamp-turning-into-cobra makes sense, in a "dream" way. But the bear? Now, mind you darlings, this all happened before I ever cracked open Walker’s Woman’s Encyclopedia today and copied out the information on "Arabia" published above. As it so happens, when I first opened the book, I came upon an entry of Atalanta: Amazonian huntress, the best athlete in Calydon. As an infant, Atalanta was suckled by Artemis herself, in totemic form as a She-Bear. When she grew up, she took part in the famous hunt of the Calydonian Boar and drew first blood, pausing only to kill two centaurs who tried to rape her on the hunting field. Ah ha! Bells went off in my head. Artemis was the bear! But not only a bear, Walker links her to the "Hind of Hinds" (Hind al-Hunud): "Many Koreshites remained faithful to the Goddess and to their queen, Hind al-Hunud: the Hind of Hinds, similar to the title of Artemis" – but I didn’t know that until I read and then posted the entry on Arabia from The Woman’s Encyclopedia today! So – my admittedly amateur interpretation of my "waking dreams" is that the Goddess (in bear and serpent forms) approve/approved my intent/plan to post more about the ancient battle queens here – even before I knew I was going to do it. Well, they are goddesses, they can "see" the future! A couple notes. Based on what I read in Walker, Fatima, the putative daughter of Mohammed, is a "sister" of the ancient Egyptian cow-goddess Hathor. One of Fatima’s titles is "Red Cow," and Fatima shares many other titles and attributes with Egyptian Hathor. Hathor was also considered a moon goddess, because her horns formed a "crescent" moon. Hmmm, where have we seen that symbol before? Oh yeah, on the flags of many countries where Islam is the majority religion. Hmmm….