The coldest permanently inhabited places on Earth are found in the Arctic Circle. But, thanks to
the difficulty of living and exploring the polar regions, there’s plenty up there that’s long been
forgotten. Now, though, slowly, we are getting to grips with the history of the frozen north.
This is Unveiled, and today we’re taking a closer
look at four of the most bizarre relics found buried so far in the Arctic Circle.
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In 2015, news broke that a new type of hadrosaur had been unearthed deep in the heart of Alaska.
Commonly nicknamed “duck-billed dinosaurs”, the Hadrosaurids were a group of herbivores
alive during the late Cretaceous period, which lasted from 100 million years ago all the way
up to the asteroid strike that ultimately killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
It’s rare however to find dinosaur fossils so far north. The discoveries of fossils in parts
of Alaska within the Arctic Circle have then raised many questions among paleontologists.
As far as we know, Earth was very warm during the Cretaceous period, with oceans boasting
tropical temperatures around the world and ice unable to form on the planet’s poles. But it
would still have been significantly colder at the poles than across the rest of Earth, and
hadrosaurs are remarkably large dinosaurs to live in such a cold place – so how did they get there?
For decades, it was thought that dinosaurs, like most modern reptiles, were cold-blooded.
Scientists now believe this isn’t true, and that they were actually somewhere between being cold
and warm-blooded. But it’s still interesting to see them in such frozen climes when they relied
on the environment and on specific adaptations to manage their temperature. Hadrosaurs were grazers,
so there had to have been far more vegetation in the Arctic Circle at
the time that they were alive. With some fossils seemingly revealing species of
hadrosaur wholly unique to the Arctic, then, within just this one field of research we’re
discovering that our own planet was once even more alien than we ever imagined.
Next, a relic that was lost far more recently than the age of the dinosaurs. And an entirely
different part of history coming into view. In 2016, a group of Russian scientists revealed that
they’d found a secret Nazi base on a remote Arctic island. It’s named “Schatzgräber”,
meaning “Treasure Hunter” in English. The base is built on Alexandra Land,
an island out in the seas of the north pole, above Russia. As far as we know,
it was first sighted by English explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith in 1880. He named it
after Alexandra of Denmark, who was married to the future King Edward VII and serving
as Princess of Wales. Five years later, a British expedition set foot on the island.
But Alexandra Land was never considered especially important until the Nazis decided
to build a weather station there in 1943. The Nazis built a lot of top-secret weather bases
all over the world during the height of the Third Reich, including as far west as on the
island of Labrador in Canada. The Treasure Hunter base, though, rediscovered by Russia,
had an unfortunate ending – unfortunate for the Nazis, that is – where all who
were stationed there got sick after eating raw polar bear meat. There was no food shortage
that led them to this decision, just a cook who didn’t realize it wasn’t safe to make a
“steak tartare” from a polar bear. Everybody who ate the meat developed “trichinosis”,
a disease caused by parasitic roundworms, and the base had to be evacuated. In the following decade,
the Soviet Union also established a weather station on the island. However, the earlier Nazis
had left behind a minefield. Apparently, German veterans tried and failed to alert the Soviets
to the mines. They weren’t removed until the 1990s when the Norwegian Polar Institute got involved.
Fast forward to today, and this derelict Nazi base is now being studied by historians. It
isn’t the only relatively modern, isolated settlement abandoned up there in the Arctic,
either. In 1998, the small town of Pyramiden, built by the USSR, was also slowly abandoned
by its people. For decades, it had been a coal mining town, although only around 1,000 people
lived there when it was at its most populous. Eventually, it proved too incredibly hostile to
stay there and immensely isolated, but today it stands as an interesting relic of a bygone era.
But of course, humans have lived elsewhere in the Arctic for thousands of years,
as some major archaeological finds have revealed. One example is the Yana society,
who lived in Siberia, but were only discovered by modern day researchers in the early 2000s.
They’re so named because the site attached to them, deep in the wilderness and littered with
traces of people past, is on the banks of the Yana River. It’s sad to think, but the reason
we’ve been able to make the Yana discoveries - and, indeed, many other discoveries in the
Arctic - is because of climate change. Previously, relics of the ancient Yana had been buried in ice,
and incredibly difficult to stumble upon and access. But, as the world warms up
and permafrost begins to melt at the poles, we’re able to unearth what was once hidden
from view. Long-lost artifacts from an ancient community. Until the discovery of the Yana,
it was believed that humans hadn’t lived in this region of Siberia until around 14,000 years ago.
But the DNA strands extracted from the teeth of human remains now date back as far as 31,000 years
ago. This means that humans were living in the Arctic Circle even during the last Ice Age, which
is certainly impressive given how extraordinarily cold and difficult it must have been.
Zooming further out, and because Eurasia is a continuous landmass,
humans have been able to spread remarkably far over a far longer period of time than we once
thought. The Yana society is believed to have been made of hunter gatherers who sometimes
hunted mammoths for food and ivory. But, some other things uncovered in their new-found DNA,
such as the apparent lack of inbreeding among the Yana, suggest that they weren’t the only people
living across this region. There may have been many societies, containing hundreds of people,
living alongside each other, then. As of 2022, we’re still studying the things the Yana left
behind and trying to unravel the story to find what this society may have looked like. And,
interestingly, Ancient Paleo-Siberians share DNA with Native Americans, meaning that the people
who eventually settled in North America may have also lived in this remote corner of
Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. But finally, and not dissimilar to the
discovery of the Yana people, we’ve found many ancient mummies throughout Siberia,
too. The most famous of these is the Siberian Ice Maiden, found in the Republic of Altai in
the 1990s. Buried in an underground chamber alongside her horses, she belonged to the
ancient Pazyryk culture that disappeared more than 2,000 years ago. The Ice Maiden became a
symbol of Altaian culture, and the local people weren’t happy when Russian authorities took the
maiden to be further studied – especially as they slightly damaged the mummy in the process.
Other mummies have been found here, as well, however, including some on the border of the
Arctic Circle wearing copper masks. In this case, their graves contained 11th-century Persian
artifacts, despite their resting place being extremely far away from Persia – which is Iran
today. These mummies have been studied for years, but they still hold a lot of mystery. For example,
their skulls are shattered, and it’s not clear why. Some suggest that their bodies may have been
left in this condition as part of a kind of ritual to prevent spells emanating from them. Ultimately
though, we don’t know why these people were buried like this or even really where they came from;
they may have been based in the Arctic, or simply passing through on their way to somewhere else.
Similarly, the remains of an Ancient Greek Scythian warrior were also found in Siberia in
2003 - a man who suffered a painful death after being shot with an arrow. Siberia’s coldness
means that the remains we find are extremely well preserved, even after thousands of years… and so,
history is now unfolding there more vividly than almost anywhere else.
Though it’s been occupied for millennia, the people and animals who have lived in the Arctic
Circle remain both mysterious and intriguing, thanks to their incredible resilience in this most
dangerous climate. But those are four of the most bizarre relics found buried in the Arctic Circle.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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