The first humans arrived in Siberia around one million years ago - attracted by mild weather!

Studies of a site occupied by the Karam people enable experts to reach this conclusion, said Mikhail Shunkov, deputy director of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

'We can now say that the oldest layers of this dwelling site date back some one million years, 800,000 years at the minimum,' he was quoted saying by Interfax. 

The intrepid migrants arrived by the so-called 'northern route' having ventured from Africa. 

'They by-passed Tibet and the Himalayas from the north and south, and the southern route led them to Southeast Asia,' he said. 

An example was Java Man - or  Pithecanthropus erectus - found in 1891 in Indonesia. 

'The northern route is believed to have run through the mountains of Central Asia, the territories of today's Kazakhstan and the Central Asian republics, and eventually he came to the southern part of Siberia," said Shunkov.

The climate was significantly warmer at the time, say scientists, and was 'similar to that of today's Northern Caucasus, and most probably even warmer'.