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The Ket-Imbak of Central Siberia

The Ket-Imbak [Ket],a small relict population of the nearly extinct Yenisenian people,occupy small villages approximately mid-way between the headwaters of the Yeniseni River and the Kara Sea in Russia.The Kara fluvial system,which is about 4000km west of the Seward Peninsula,Alaska,flows NNW along the western flank of the Central Siberian Plateau.

The Ket probably trekked north from the vicinity of the Altai and Sayan mountains of central,south Siberia,where they may have been neighbours of the proto-Samoyed.Ket folklore relates that their ancient ancestors crossed a huge mountain [the Sayan Mountains on the border of China and Russia?]into the taiga to escape from Tystad warriors ca 200-300? ADE.The fierce Kiliki forced the Ket to move further north ca 800-900? ADE,where they might have assimilated with or replaced the indigenous inhabitants.Some Ket words seem to have been borrowed from an "Eskimo" language. The Knotts,Assians,Arins,Baikats and Pumpokols shared a common a common cultural heritage with the Ket and lived further south in the Yeniseni River valley.Ca 1500-1800 ADE  the five above groups were largely assimilated into neighbouring populations.The Assans merged with the Ewnki,a Tungusic speaking ethic group,who were dispersed between the taiga of central Siberia and the lower Amur River region of eastern Asia [E Vajda,2002?].

The Ket loose fitting male robe [cafton]and scarf are unique to the Siberian taiga They could have been worn in the south and adapted to colder conditions.There is evidence that the southern Yenisenian populations [Eg;Arins] raised stock and smelted iron.The Ket did not.They foraged,fished from dugout canoes and hunted [eg;waterfowl ] with poison arrows and dogs.Some families used reindeer to move camp.They lived in tipi with conical pole frames that had felt or bark covering during the warm months.Their winter abodes were earth-log dugouts.The Ket were a patriarch society.A bride price was paid for a wife,who came to live with her husband's family.These people were shamanists,who revered the bear.Each group had a totem animal,which they did not hunt.Their folklore hero was Balna,an ancient warrior.Broken personal items and the occasional dog have been recovered from Ket graves,which were dug in the earth.Their musical instrument was the pymet,a type of mouth organ.The government forced the Ket to live in cooperative settlements in the 1930s [ibid].

There were approximately 2000 Ket in the 2003 census,but only about a hundred speak fluent Ket and they are mostly over fifty years old.The Ket language bears no resemblance to any other language that is spoken east of the Yeniseni River in Siberia.Nadene languages are used North America by numerous Athapaskan tribes in Alaska,the Tingit,Eyak,a number of western Canadian native groups,the Hopi of California and a few SW,USA tribes,[eg;Navajo,Apache].As early as 1923 linguists speculated that there could be a relationship betwwen the Yenisenic and Na Dene languages About ten years ago M Rublen produced a list of 36 cognates,with similar meanings,that were common to the two languages.However cognates can occur by chance [B Comrie,2008].

E Vajda [2008] demonstrated that Ket words had been systematically altered to create Athapaskan words and that the abstract forms of lexical, grammatical morphemes  and rules of compostion of Ket verbs find numerous parallels in construction of the Na Dene proto-languages.His analysis could infer that the modern Na Dene languages were derived from an ancient Yeniseni language.His study also showed that the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands do not speak a language,which was derived from Yeniseni.

Some linguists [eg;S Starostin] have speculated that the Basque,Caucasian,Burushaski, Sino- Tibetan,Yeniseni,Na Dene, Sumerian and Etruscan language families might have had their origins in the Dene Caucasian family of languages,that "may" have been used in Eurasia ca 40-20KA ago[conjectural].An ancient tongue can survive with significant modifications among populations, that have been relatively isolated physically and/or culturally for a long time.Q Medhi [2001] constructed a genetic tree from numerous satellite markers,which indicated that the Basque had a closer genetic relationship to the Hunza than to the other four Pakistan populations that were analysed.The Hunza live in a high Himalaya valley and speak Burushaski [Sforza,2001].

The Y chromosome sample of 48 Ket males had a 93.8 frequency of haplogroup [hg] Q,which is the highest percentage in Siberia.The high presence of hg Q among the Ket and the Selkup Uralic speakers [66.4%] could be attributed to intergenerational genetic drift,that is coupled with founder effects.Hg Q is tentatively estimated to date to 17.7 +/- 4.8Ka [T Karafet,2002].It is probably ancestral to QM3,which is dominant among Na Dene language speakers in North America [T Shurr, 2004]However the Ket mtDNA hgs are mainly C,F and U,which resembles adjacent Siberian populations.MtDNA hg A2 is prevalent among Na Dene speakers in North America [T Karafet,2002].E Starikovskaya [2005]sequenced the complete mtDNA of one Ket female,with hg A1 and mutations that predate the split of A2 from A1 in Beringia [?],before it was introduced to North America.It is also present among the Chukchi.MtDNA U4 has its highest frequency [28.9%] among the Ket [O Derbeneva,2001].Sub-hg U4 could be indicative of an Upper Palaeolithic European remnant population,which traversed the Ural Mountains [ibid,2002].Since the Ket are a patriarch society,the female genes will exhibit far greater variation than the male Y chromosomes,which are a better indicator of Ket origins.

Kozintsev [1998] claimed that Bronze Age crania from the Yeniseni populations had a closer affinity to native North Americans,than any other Asian skulls,which he had examined.A Na Dene mtDNA sequence with 4 or 5 native American specific mutations was identified by Tamm [2007] in a Selkup sample.It probably belongs to a recent arrival from America. Ancestors of the Yeniseni  may have introduced a proto-Na Dene to North America,but more definitive evidence is required to confirm this premise.

 

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