Larger context for LACK in Corpus USbrown_UKbncw/UK_bncw.txt
These included the Buryat Mongols, the Turkic peoples of the Altai-Sayan mountains, and the west Siberian Tatars.
This division reflects one of several points of contrast between the Siberian natives and those of northern North America.
Before the advent of the Europeans the latter lacked any contact with more "advanced cultures (except in so far as the influence of the Aztecs and other peoples of Central America may have percolated northward), whereas Siberia, as part of the "Old World cultural complex, was subject to many influences ( however remote) from the great civilizations of Eurasia.
Above all this meant China, but also included Persia, since the nomadic pastoralists of the steppes (who had their own, sophisticated equestrian culture) carried elements of these cultures to the northern forest peoples.
As a result, metal&rehy;working (which was hardly developed at all in North American native cultures) was widespread in Siberia from the second millennium BC, and long before the seventeenth century AD all its indigenous peoples either worked iron themselves or used artefacts made of the precious metal when these could be obtained by trade.