This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.
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For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII |... - 0 views
www.smithsonianmag.com/...of-World-War-II-188843001.html
via:packrati.us anthropology russian isolation Siberia archaeology history
shared by Daryl Bambic on 28 Mar 13
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iberia is the source of most of Russia's oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.
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omething from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—"a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar," with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:
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he daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. "When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing."
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a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century.
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Peter was a personal enemy and "the anti-Christ in human form"—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar's campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly "chopping off the beards of Christians."
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Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov's brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.
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d neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their famil
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new there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was shown a picture of a horse, she recognized it from her mother's Bible stories. "Look, papa," she exclaimed. "A steed!"
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They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed.
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A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark.
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stream. Stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.... Bilberries and raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right on the roof."
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not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion
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Old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites.
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"What amazed him most of all," Peskov recorded, "was a transparent cellophane package. 'Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!
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Agafia's unusual speech—she had a singsong voice and stretched simple words into polysyllables—convinced some of her visitors she was slow-witted; in fact she was markedly intelligent, and took charge of the difficult task, in a family that possessed no calendars, of keeping track of time.
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many happy hours in its little sawmill, marveling at how easily a circular saw and lathes could finish wood.
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Karp Lykov fought a long and losing battle with himself to keep all this modernity at bay. When they first got to know the geologists, the family would accept only a single gift—salt
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but the sin of television, which they encountered at the geologists' camp, proved irresistible for them.... On their rare appearances, they would invariably sit down and watch. Karp sat directly in front of the screen. Agafia watched poking her head from behind a door. She tried to pray away her transgression immediately—whispering, crossing herself.... The old man prayed afterward, diligently and in one fell swoop.
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he Lord would provide, and she would stay, she said—as indeed she has. A quarter of a century later, now in her seventies herself, this child of the taiga lives on alone, high above the Abakan.
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An amazing story of a Russian Orthodox family who ran from Soviet persecution in the 1930 and survived in the wilderness of Siberia. The children had never seen other humans, developed their own dialect and lived on the perpetual edge of the world. Several family members were enthralled with technology, others were fearful but all were exceptionally intelligent.
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Guns, Germs and Steel Part 1 of 18 - YouTube - 0 views
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Inventors and Inventions from China and Taiwan - EnchantedLearning.com - 0 views
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Silk was first made by the Chinese about 4,000 years ago. Silk thread is made from the cocoon of the silkworm moth (Bombyx mori), a small moth whose caterpillar eats the leaves of the mulberry tree. According to Chinese legend, the first silk thread was made when the Chinese Empress Si-Ling-Chi was sitting under a mulberry tree and a cocoon fell into her tea; she noticed the strong, silky threads of the cocoon uncoiling. She then developed the use of silk. For more information on the development of silk, click here.
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The kite was invented roughly 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. It originated in China, Malaysia or Indonesia (there are many claims to having invented the kite). Some people say that the earliest kites consisted of a huge leaf attached to a long string (there is a type of Indonesian leaf that is wonderful as a kite).
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GUNPOWDERGunpowder was invented in China, probably during the 1000's. Gunpowder is composed of about 75 percent saltpeter (potassium nitrate), 15 percent powdered charcoal, and 10 percent sulphur. The Chinese used gunpower to make fireworks and signals, and later to make weapons of war.
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Four Great Inventions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views
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The prevailing academic consensus is that gunpowder was discovered in the 9th century by Chinese alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality.[16] By the time the Song Dynasty treatise, Wujing Zongyao (武经总要), was written by Zeng Gongliang and Yang Weide in AD 1044, the various Chinese formulas for gunpowder held levels of nitrate in the range of 27% to 50%.[17] By the end of the 12th century, Chinese formulas of gunpowder had a level of nitrate capable of bursting through cast iron metal containers, in the form of the earliest hollow, gunpowder-filled grenade bombs.
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Ancient Chinese Inventions - Top Discoveries and Inventions of the Ancient Chinese - 1 views
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cup of it. Legend says silk was discovered when a cocoon fell from a mulberry bush into a cup of imperial tea. This is similar to the legend of the discovery of tea where an emperor (Shen Nung (2737 B.C.)) drank a cup of water into which leaves from an overhanging Camellia bush had fallen. Tea, no matter what country it comes from, is from the Camellia sinensis plant. It seems to have been a new beverage in the third century A.D., a time when it was still regarded with suspicion, much as the tomato was when it was first brought to Europe. Today we refer to beverages as tea even though there is no real tea in them. (Purists call them tisanes.) In the early period, there was confusion, too, and the Chinese for tea was sometimes used to refer to other plants, according to Bodde.
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The principle behind gunpowder was discovered by the Chinese in perhaps the first century A.D., during the Han Dynasty. It wasn't used in guns at the time, but created explosions at festivals.
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History of Chinese Technology - 4 views
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We don't know exactly when paper was first used in China but evidence from archaeological records indicate that it was prior to the first century AD. In China, the most common source for paper was the bark of the paper mulberry tree (Gies & Gies 1994 p 182
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In technologically development, the story is much different (see Burke (1978) for more descriptions of these innovations). There have been many Western innovations that have their basis in China, particularly those in printing (paper, block printing, and moveable-type printing), agricultural technology (irrigation systems), mechanical engineering (clockwork, iron, and lead manufacturing, efficient harnesses), and martial (gunpowder, the precursors to the barrel gun, and cannons) technology.
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