During the last several thousand years, in particular, the Minusinsk Basin has been continuously inhabited by a succession of populations whose cultures provide the single most spectacular archaeological continuum in all of North Asia. Starting with the late Neolithic (and still controversial) Tazmin culture (approximately 2000 to 2500 B.C. )through the subsequent Afanas'evo, Okunevo, Andronovo, and Karasuk cultures, the Minusinsk Basin seems to have been inhabited by semisedentary agriculturalists and cattle breeders with an increasingly strong steppe-nomadic orientation.
It is not known which language the Tashtyk people spoke, but evidence from comparative linguistics suggests that an early Turkic idiom may have been involved. In any case, a few centuries later the population of the Minusinsk Basin had become largely Turkic-speaking, as evidenced by the written documents in runic Turkic that have been found in the region.From these earliest Siberian inscriptions, as well as from other historical sources