At the tail end of the 17th century, as adventurous bands of treasure hunters, trappers and explorers,

began to journey eastwards from the Russian heartlands around Moscow and St Petersburg in search of new lands and new riches.

Not one of them could have predicted the magnitude of the discoveries that they were about to make.

To say that Siberia is vast would be an understatement. It spans 10% of the entire world's landmass

and crosses a multitude of modern-day countries. Much of its northern

expanse is made up of inhospitable frozen forests and windswept plains, that stretch all the way from

the Baltic and the west to the Pacific in the east. Yet just to the south of this permafrosted wasteland

lies a long strip of unbroken steppe and grassland from Europe to Mongolia.

It was here, into that primal and desolate landscape framed by steep mountains and haunting birch forests

that those early Russian explorers first set foot over 300 years ago.

What they found there would change our understanding of the world forever.

People lived in Siberia at the time, in much the same way as their ancestors had done for millennia,

reading the signs of the elements, living under the stars, and tending to their livestock in a timeless pastoral existence.

But it wasn't the locals that these Russian explorers were interested in.

Rumors and reports had recently began to surface of mysterious and ancient edifices, dotting

the inhospitable landscapes of far remote valleys in ancient plateaus.

Before long, the rumors became fact, and the Russian explorers began to come into contact

with a world so far removed from the present

that they could scarcely believe what they had found.

The Altai Mountains are an ancient place, a timeless place.

Today, mysterious primal standing stones still littered the landscape, and they are bordered

by something even more incredible, hundreds upon hundreds

...