Cold Weather Peoples

Jan 31
07:41

2012

Dan Thaler

Dan Thaler

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People have live in every imaginable climate that exists on Earth. Some of the most precarious for human existence are the frozen wastes of the far north, such as Canada and Siberia. Read on to learn about interesting cold weather peoples like the Eskimos, Turkic tribes of Siberia, and more.

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 Humans are an incredibly adaptable species,Cold Weather Peoples Articles and as such we have been able to live in incredibly diverse climate zones in a way that few other animals can match. We live in the driest deserts, the wettest rain forests, the most fertile grasslands to the inhospitable frozen wastes of the north. While all humans are equally fascinating, the peoples who live in cold weather areas like the Arctic Circle, in Northern Russia, Canada, and Greenland, are the subject of this article.


Contrary to popular belief, there are a tremendous amount of people who live in Siberia, one of the coldest places on the planet. The area is actually larger than the Continental United States so it isn't very densely populated, but there are over forty million people who live in the vast frozen wastes. It isn't completely fair to refer to this area as a frozen wasteland, however, as there are large cities here and there. The vast majority of the people in this land of cold weather are ethnic Russians, for they have largely replaced the older populations, of whom many still remain.


Probably the largest group of people in Siberia after the Russians are the various Turkic peoples. These people all speak languages that are closely related to the Turkish spoken in Turkey in a similar way that our English language is closely related to German. There are also many people who speak languages similar to Mongolian, and a great deal of people who speak languages that are similar to Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. This last group is known as the Uralic language family. Because there are so many different ethnic groups in this cold weather land called Siberia it is difficult to describe them all, but many of them, especially those who belong to the smaller and more marginal ethnic groups, are still relatively traditionalist peoples who live off the land. Many others, however, are modern city-goers like the Buryats of Ulan-Ude.


There are also many indigenous people in Northern Canada and Greenland who specialize in cold weather climate. Many of these people are known as the Inuit, Yupik, or Eskimos. The first two names are different groupings, and the latter word, Eskimo, is used to refer to both. It is not actually offensive as some people may say. The word is thought to mean either “people who speak other languages” or “snowshoe user”, not “red meat eater”. That said, many Eskimo peoples necessarily subsist on a meat diet as the surest source of nutrients in the arctic circle are large mammals like reindeer and seals. There are only a handful of people who still live off the land as hunter gatherers, but those who do live a precarious existence.


Due to this precarious existence, it is important not to deride hunter gatherers for being primitive in anyway. Is it fair to call a culture primitive if they can survive in such an ecosystem? It is highly doubtful that an urban New Yorker would be able to live in the cold weather of Northern Siberia, Canada, Alaska, or Greenland. These fascinating people, like others who live in precarious ecosystems, have much to teach us city-goers about civilization.