 some finds from the northeastern part of what was formerly Soviet Turkistan, for example, are related to certain objects made in Iran and Mesopotamia, and those from northwestern Central Asia are linked to eastern and central Europe by means of the Volga River and of Kazakhstan.The Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) sites of western Turkistan are mainly concentrated in the Lake Baikal area. A cave in the Baysuntau Range containing the body of a Neanderthal boy aged about nine had been so carefully prepared that it is evident that the people who made his grave believed in an afterlife. The site of Malta, 50 miles (80 kilometres) to the southeast of Irkutsk, and that of Buret, 80 miles (130 kilometres) to the north, are noted for their mammoth-tusk figurines of nude women. They resemble Paleolithic statuettes from Europe and the Middle East and probably served as fertility symbols or as representations of the great goddess, whose cult was widespread. Some of these figurines depict elegant, slender women, others heavy, corpulent ones. Of five found at Buret, one is unusual in that it is of a clothed woman wearing a one-piece trouser suit with a hood attached to it comparable to those still worn by present-day Eskimos. In recent years Paleolithic sites have been discovered south of Samarkand, and rock paintings have been found at Zaraut Say (Zaraut Stream) in the Babatag Range, 50 miles east of Termiz, and in the Shakty Caves in the Pamirs. Executed in red ochre, they depict hunting scenes. Those in the Shakty Cave are the older and include a man disguised as a bird and other men wearing skins and shooting at wild oxen with bows and arrows.The invention of the bow is ascribed to the 10th millennium BC, the Mesolithic Period (Middle Stone Age). Artistic development during this period is attested by a pottery fragment of a most expressive woman's face dating from the 3rd millennium BC and recovered from the site of Vosnessenovka in western Siberia.Neolithic and Metal Age culturesMany Neolithic (New Stone Age (Neolithic Period)) sites were discovered in what was formerly Soviet Central Asia, and the number of Bronze Age sites is even higher. The majority were found on the middle reaches of the Yenisey River, especially in the Minusinsk Basin, where metallurgy developed early. They testify to the existence of three main, basically successive, yet often overlapping cultures: the Afanasyevskaya, Andronovo, and Karasuk, so called after the villages near which each culture was identified.A cemetery to the southwest of Krasnoyarsk, on the slopes of the Afanasyevskaya Mountains, contained 80 burials dating from the 2nd millennium BC. The earlier ones were flat and marked by stone circles symbolizing the Sun god; the later ones took the form of barrows, or large mounds of earth, but were also encircled by similar stone slabs. The earlier graves (tomb) contained elongated, spherical pottery vessels with pointed bases decorated with herringbone patterns. In the later graves this type of ware was superseded by flat-bottomed pots usually associated with sedentary pastoralist cultures. The graves also contained numerous stone and bone objects. Although copper objects were rare, they heralded the dawn of a new cultural period, the Metal Age.The Andronovo culture succeeded the Afanasyevskaya in the 2nd and 1st millennia BC. Although found to the southwest of Krasnoyarsk, it is more frequently encountered in western Siberia and Kazakhstan. The settlement and cemetery of Alekseevskoe (present Tenlyk), some 400 miles (600 kilometres) south of Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk), is especially important, because its earth houses were designed for permanent habitation. Their roofs rested on logs, and each dwelling had a central hearth used for heating purposes with side hearths intended for cooking. Bronze objects were numerous, and workshops existed for working copper. The metal probably came from mines in the Minusinsk Basin, Kazakhstan, and the western Altai Mountains, the latter having been worked as early as the 14th century BC.Dating from about 12