Sayan Mountains
According to Sev’yan I. Vainshtein, Sayan reindeer herding "is the oldest form of reindeer herding" and is associated with the "earliest domestication of the reindeer by the Samoyedic taiga population" of the Sayan Mountains at the "turn of the first millenium A.D... The Sayan region was apparently the origin of the economic and cultural complex of reindeer hunters-herdsmen that we now see among the various Evenki groups and the peoples of the Sayan area." The Sayan ethnic groups still live almost exclusively in the area of the Eastern Sayan mountains.