Altai Mountains

I've heard it both ways.

I don't know if there is a right or a wrong answer, but I know if you went to the Himalayas or the Altai Mountains of Russia, you may become a Shilajit drug lord or some- something like that.

I would assume that you'd go there and come back with a supply for me and have things running smoothly.

But it's Shilajit, I say it, but I've heard many people say Shilajit.

In contrast to Near Eastern metallurgists, who usually made unique objects designed for wealthy elites, the Sintashta made bars and ready-made objects designed for large-scale export.

Unfortunately, their current markets to the east and west, the Altai Mountains and Volga-Don region, were just not doing the trick.

What they really needed was a lucrative new market.

And from their viewpoint south of the Ural Mountains, the only way up was down.

She was then the most powerful and the most enlightened, the most progressive and the best governed empire not only in Asia but on the face of the globe.

Taizong's frontiers reached from the confines of Persia, the Caspian Sea and the Altai of the Kyrgyz steppe along these mountains to the north side of the Gobi Desert eastward to the inner Hing'an, while Sogdiana, Khorasan and the regions around the Hindu Kush also acknowledged his suzerainty.

The sovereign of Nepal and Magadha in India sent envoys, and in 643 envoys appeared from the Byzantine Empire and the court of Persia.

The empire of Genghis Khan, died 1227, was considerably greater and contained a great part of China, but Genghis Khan was a foreign conqueror.

As I say, Mongolia.

Outer Mongolia, yes, surrounded by the Altai Mountains.

Absolutely beautiful.

Being serenaded at night by the sound of an eagle and several yaks wandering past what was effectively my front door on the ger.

Yeah.

Um, I did in the age of 22 a year in the trip, a year and four months, starting in Moscow and taking the Trans-Siberian train, crossing Russia over roughly two months, going to Altai mountains and doing a horse treks over there, stitching a horse ass after a few.

Going from there and getting the train.

It's every time it's two, three days in train, right? Uh, going from there to the Baikal and so on.

They moved to the harsh, unforgiving edges of Siberia, establishing hidden, self-sufficient villages deep in the Taika.

They went south to the rugged Altai Mountains.

They also crossed international borders.

Thousands fled west into Poland, the Baltics, and the territories of the Ottoman Empire.

In 2008, deep in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, a team of archaeologists found a bone.

Not a skull, not a jaw, not some dramatic fossilised skeleton frozen mid-stride, just a tiny fragment from a pinky finger, so small you could lose it in the folds of your palm.

so unremarkable that if you'd walked past it in the dirt you might have mistaken it for a pebble or a chip of rock nobody in that moment understood what they were actually holding They thought maybe it belonged to a Neanderthal, maybe an early modern human, just another data point in a cave that had already given up plenty of secrets.

So, let's actually go there.

Let's stand at the mouth of this cave and understand why, of all the places on Earth, this particular hole in a mountainside became ground zero for one of the biggest discoveries in human evolutionary history.

Denisova Cave sits in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, close to where Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China all nearly touch each other.

Look at a map and you'll notice something interesting.

This isn't some random, isolated pocket of wilderness.