[Iran Press TV] Archaeologists have unearthed ancient settlements in southern Siberia, which they believe were built by the original Aryan race about 4,000 years ago.
Some 20 of the spiral-shaped settlements were found in a remote area bordering Kazakhstan and date back to the beginning of Western civilization in Europe.
Experts say the Bronze-age structures might have been built by Aryans shortly after the Great Pyramid was constructed some 4,000 years ago.
"Potentially, this could rival ancient Greece in the age of the heroes," Daily Mail quoted TV historian Bettany Hughes as saying.
| Good lord, are they still fussing over their non-conquest of Greece in the 5th century BCE? Persia was a world power for more than a millenium, surely that should suffice. |
"Because I have written a lot about the Bronze Age world, there always seemed to be this huge missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle," she added.
Remains of the ancient city were first explored around 20 years ago and studies showed that it would have housed between 1,000 and 200 people.
The language spoken by the Aryan people has been identified as the ancestor of some modern European tongues. Some English words, for instance, such as brother, oxen and guest have been traced back to the Aryans.
"We are all told that there is this kind of mother tongue, proto-Indo-European, from which all the languages we know emerge," Hughes said.
| Not all of them, Historian Hughes. There are also the proto-languages of the Pacific Islands, sub-Saharan Africa, east Asia, and the Americas, plus some minor ones that don't seem related to anything else. One hopes the Iran PressTV reporter misquoted, one really does. |
"I was very excited to hear on the archaeological grapevine that in exactly the period I am an expert in, this whole new Bronze Age civilization had been discovered on the steppe of southern Siberia." |