Number 10 Wooly Mammoths Siberian winters are long and temperatures
average -13 °F. The area’s permafrost acts as a graveyard to an estimated 100 million
wooly mammoths.
A number of them were discovered in the past century and the latest specimen, found in
2018, had liquid blood and well-preserved muscle tissue.
These massive ice age-beasts roamed the region as recently as 10,000 years ago.
On the Russian Plain, they were massively hunted by both Neanderthals and modern humans.
Their bones were used to make dwellings and the ivory of their tusk was crafted into tools
and sculptures.
In fact, mammoth ivory is still traded and, unlike elephant ivory, it’s entirely legal
in most places.
There are some stories about isolated mammoth herds that supposedly still roam the deep
Siberian wilderness.
While the creature most likely went extinct, the sheer immensity of the area means that
its survival can’t be entirely ruled out.
Number 9 Giant Ice Circles Siberia’s Lake Baikal is known to display
patterns of mysterious ice circles and there’s no consensus on their origin.
The lake, in and of itself, is described by many extremes.
It’s the oldest, deepest and, in terms of water volume, largest lake on the planet.
It contains more water than the North American Great Lakes combined.
Baikal has a maximum depth of 5,387 feet, almost twice as much as the Burj Khalifa,
the world’s tallest building.
The perfect ice rings that form during spring time have been blamed on shamanic rituals
and alien communication.
Yet, an extensive project from the Russian Academy of Sciences favors a different explanation.
Baikal is a rift lake, meaning that it appeared as the result of stretching in the continental
crust.
One theory is that these mysterious circles are naturally formed by methane that emits
from the lake’s tectonic basin.
Number 8 Denisova Cave The Denisova Cave has been invaluable in understanding
prehistoric species as well as human evolution.
The cave, located in the Altai Mountains, maintains an average temperature of 32 °F.
This has contributed to the preservation of prehistoric remains and artifacts.
Some of them, such as a needle crafted out of bone, go back 50,000 years.
Based on the recovered fossils, a previously-unidentified hominin species was named after the cave.
In addition to 5 distinct Homo denisova fossils, archeologists also recovered a Neanderthal
finger bone.
It’s believed that both archaic human species as well as anatomically-modern humans inhabited
the cave.
There’s also a suspicion that they interbred and there are several human populations alive
today with traces of archaic human DNA.
The remains of other prehistoric mammals found at Denisova include cave lions, cave hyenas
and a 32,000-year-old horse.
Number 7 Mummified Creature In the early 2010s, the mummified remains
of a creature were discovered in the Sakha Republic, at one of Russia’s leading diamond
mines.
Since the region is known for prehistoric finds, the miners who retrieved the remains
from the diamondiferous sands believed it was a dinosaur species.
The creature’s hairless appearance was, indeed, reminiscent of a reptilian.
However, a number of hunters as well as a leading Russian paleontologist identified
the find as the remains of a sable.
This is a small omnivorous mammal that’s hunted for its black or dark brown fur, which
is considered a luxury good.
A hunter had skinned the animal and abandoned it or dug it into the sand where it was preserved
by the freezing temperature.
Number 6 Bone Armor In 2014, Russian archeologists unearthed a
piece of unique, Bronze Age bone armor at a site in Siberia.
The recovered fragments assembled into a piece that was roughly 3,900 years old and potentially
crafted by Samus-Seyminskaya culture.
This population had migrated about 600 miles to Omsk, where the piece was found, from a
region of the Altai Mountains.
It’s still unclear what animal the bones belonged to or whether the armor itself was
a gift, spoils of war or part of some ceremony.
Archeologists argued that it could have belonged to an elite warrior, a type of “hero”
highly prolific in battle techniques.
As such, the warrior needed adequate protection from the weapons of the time such as bronze,
bone or stone-made arrows, axes and spears.
Experts argued that, during its era, the armor was “more precious than life, because it
saved life”.
Number 5 Dark Past Siberia’s dark past still haunts the region
as it was once synonymous with brutal punishment.
From 1930 to 1953, up to 1.7 million people died while detained in Soviet forced-labor
camps, known as gulags.
Others had perished before this period but the records are less clear.
The gulag system had been set up by the order of Vladimir Lenin, after the Bolsheviks took
power in 1917.
They’re often cited as the most horrific part of the Soviet regime, and the ultimate
fate of those lost to the gulags remains a mystery.
The detained were not only criminals or war captives but also a great number of political
prisoners.
The broad strokes of this category could include anyone from aspiring revolutionaries to a
person simply having made a joke about the Soviet system.
Most of the camps were located in the remote areas of Siberia, where the prisoners were
at the mercy of their jailers.
Eyewitness accounts of these prison camps were published with reports of severe overcrowding,
torture, beatings as well as prisoners dying of exhaustion or starvation and even cannibalism.
Number 4 Shigir Idol The Shigir Idol is the oldest wooden sculpture
in the world, going back 11,500 years.
It was found in the late 19th century at a depth of 13 feet in a peat bog in Shigir.
The anaerobic conditions of the bog prevented the wood from decomposing.
Made out of larch, the sculpture was carved with stone tools, or possibly with the lower
jaw bones of a beaver.
Reconstruction from recovered fragments showed an arrangement similar to that of a totem
pole.
Its top portion is a head with a defined face, eyes, nose and mouth.
The rest of it features decorative carvings.
The rebuild stood at 9 feet but the original could have measured 17 feet, or about as much
as an adult giraffe.
Considering that it was made by hunter-gatherers with stone chisels or animal bones, the Shigir
Idol is quite remarkable.
No one knows its meaning.
The carvings might tell a creation myth or serve as a navigational aid.
The idol could represent a forest spirit or serve as a warning to others not to approach
the area.
Number 3 Dyatlov Pass Incident The 1959 gruesome demise of nine experienced
alpinists at Dyatlov Pass is still attributed to a “compelling natural force”.
Members of the group, led by Igor Dyatlov, were all from the Ural Polytechnic Institute.
The area where they camped, on the slopes of Mount Kholat Syakhl, was named in the group
leader’s honor.
Nobody knows what happened on the night of February the 1st to 2nd but it made the alpinists
desperately tear out of their tents.
They fled the campsite, ill-equipped to handle the harsh, sub-zero temperatures.
Soviet authorities claimed that six of them succumbed to hypothermia while three had suffered
terrible wounds.
These included a broken skull, major chest fractures, one victim was missing both eyes
and another was missing their tongue.
Some of the clothes and equipment reportedly showed traces of radiation.
What brought about their tragic fate remains among the greatest Siberian mysteries.
The original explanation was that the campsite had been struck by hurricane-level winds which
triggered an avalanche, causing the group to flee in panic.
It was questioned by subsequent terrain analysis, which didn’t really favor such an event.
Another theory is that the wind going around the mountain created a pattern of swirling
vortices, known as a Karman vortex street.
The phenomenon can produce infrasounds capable of inducing panic attacks in humans.
The groups would’ve fled in the middle of the night and then failed to find their way
back in the darkness.
Other proposed explanations range from an animal attack to military tests involving
radiological weapons or parachute mines.
As with most unexplained events, alien experimentation was also proposed but some also suggested
a potential Yeti attack.
Number 2 Patomskiy Crater To this day, no one has determined how this
enormous mass of shattered limestone came to be.
Known as the Patomskiy, or Patom Crater, it weighs roughly 1 million tons, meaning that
it’s heavier than the Golden Gate Bridge.
The stone cone occupies an estimated volume of 8,800,000 cubic feet and rises 130 feet
above the surrounding forest.
This, to compare, is significantly taller than the statue of Christ the Redeemer in
Rio de Janeiro.
The ring-shaped crown features a smaller, rounded mound at its center.
Oddly enough, in spite of its tremendous size, the Patomskiy crater has only been dated as
being 300 to 350 years old.
It might be historically recent, but there are no sources attesting its existence up
until 1949.
Stranger still, the trees surrounding the crater seem to have experienced accelerated
growth, a suspected consequence of radiation.
If this is the case, nobody knows where said radiation would be coming from.
Extraterrestrial contact is among the fringe theories regarding the crater’s origins
while the most common hypotheses include geologic processes, volcanism or
a meteor strike.
Number 1 Tunguska Event This is the largest impact event to have occurred
on Earth in recorded history.
The Tunguska event was a massive explosion, estimated at up to a staggering 30 megatons
of TNT.
That type of energy release is second only to the Soviet-made Tsar Bomba, the most powerful
thermonuclear weapon in history.
It would’ve completely destroyed a large metropolitan area.
Fortunately, it occurred over the sparsely-populated Eastern Siberian Taiga, near the Podkamennaya
Tunguska River.
According to local papers, on the morning of June the 30th 1908, a, bluish-white heavenly
body travelled across the sky for several minutes.
Then, a barrage of powerful explosions occurred and the resulting shockwave knocked several
people off their feet.
The occurrence is believed to have claimed at least 3 lives.
Even though it’s known as an “impact event” no impact crater was ever found.
A meteorite comet, 160 to 620 feet in diameter, is believed to have disintegrated upon atmospheric
entry.
The earth-shattering airburst levelled approximately 80 million trees, over 830 square miles of
forest.
That’s larger than the Hawaiian island of Maui.
Hundreds of papers were subsequently written about the event and the heavenly body theory
disintegration theory, although the most likely, is still debated.
Another proposition is that the object had glanced off the planet’s atmosphere and
returned to solar orbit.
One theory is that the explosion was geophysical, and had occurred after millions of tons of
natural gas were released from the Earth’s crust.
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