Thread by @Rad_Sherwoodism

The Dark Tent Ritual

It is night in the taiga of the frozen north. The shaman has been bound and left alone inside a tent. You gather around it in the darkness. Sounds emerge.

Animal sounds.

They want to talk.

A paper last year examined this "dark tent ritual," which is found from western Siberia all the way to the American plains.

It combines new genetic studies with old methods to give a history to what some consider timeless--a shamanic ritual.

The author, Charles Stépanoff, believes it emerged in Siberia and crossed the Bering Strait with the Paleo-Eskimos.

This is the second wave of migration to America, which brought the Dorset and Saqqaq cultures, and very likely the Na-Dene language family.

He examines ethnographic accounts and identifies aspects of this ritual which are unique, or combined in a unique way, and appear consistently across this range

He also identifies the purpose of the ritual, to communicate with animal spirits, which implies a specific perspective on the world he calls "personal animism"

In Siberia, he finds the ritual associated with only Paleo-Asian peoples, a set of language families that excludes the widespread and more recent Altaic

Recent genetic data connects these Paleo-Asians with the Mal'ta-Buret culture, which contributed Ancient North Eurasian ancestry to both North American and Indo-European populations

The same data connects them to the Na-Dene language family, whose possible relationship to modern Siberia I've mentioned elsewhere

By looking at the distribution of this unique ritual and combining it with genetic and linguistic data, not only can we give a history to a kind of religion often thought timeless, we can all also peer into the deep past of North America and find its Ancient North Eurasian roots

For more on circumpolar peoples, check out #nunavutnovember