How Did Siberians Survive -60 Before Central Heating?

Sixty below zero, windows made of ice, and a frozen river that hides water under the snow. Gary drops into a Sakha family's log house beside the Yana River near Verkhoyansk, one of the coldest places on Earth, in the winter of 1901, and has to get through it the way the people there really did. 00:00 Sixty below, and windows of ice 1:06 Walls made of cow dung 2:52 The fire that never sleeps 4:49 Water comes in blocks 7:10 Milk sold by the pound 9:12 Seventy-five below, not a breath of wind 10:56 Did Gary survive? Sources: Harry de Windt, "From Paris to New York by Land" (1903), his winter journey through Yakutsk and Verkhoyansk in 1902 (Project Gutenberg) Martin Sauer, "An Account of a Geographical and Astronomical Expedition to the Northern Parts of Russia" (1802), chapter on the Yakuts John Dundas Cochrane, "A Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary" (1824) Kathryn Yegorov-Crate, "At Home in Sakha: Sheltering in the Coldest Place on Earth", Folkways (SRAS) "Yakut", Countries and Their Cultures / Encyclopedia of World Cultures Librado et al., "Tracking the origins of Yakutian horses", PNAS (2015); A. M. Khazanov, "After the USSR" (1995) AFP, "Ice is a lifeline for the world's coldest region" (phys.org, 2018) N. A. Stepanova, "On the Lowest Temperatures on Earth", Monthly Weather Review (NOAA), via Wikipedia "Verkhoyansk" (secondary) Gary's winter is a dramatised story built on how travellers described the Sakha homesteads and rivers of the Verkhoyansk district; his host family is representative, not a recorded one. Illustrations are AI-assisted; narration is a synthetic voice. #history #siberia #survival