Thus with Penka I have argued for an Aryan race, which was Nordic in type, with Cuno that the primitive Wiro language developed on an open plain, which, with Latham and Schrader, I have placed on the Russian steppe. I have found myself in agreement with Sir John Rhys on the main features of his thesis that the Q and P Wiros left Central Europe in two successive waves, and I have argued that the Q Wiros were armed with bronze leaf-shaped swords. This last suggestion has already been hazarded in this country by Crawford,[479] though backed up with inadequate evidence, and in France by M. Hubert,[480] with whose evidence I am unacquainted, as his work dealing with the subject has not appeared as I write. But in all these cases I have endeavoured to support my argument, not merely with philological data, as has been the case with most of my predecessors, but with evidence drawn from anthropology and archæology. The evidence from the Italian swords, backed up as it is by the absence of Hallstatt iron swords from the Seine valley, seems so decisive that I feel that the equation of the Q peoples with the spread of the bronze swords is beyond dispute. But if this general reconstruction of the early history of the Wiro movements is to be considered correct, in outline at least, it must be shown that it will fit in with all the linguistic evidence available; at any rate that it is not incompatible with it. For that reason I propose in this chapter to summarise briefly, as I conceive them, the wanderings of the Wiros over Europe and Asia, from their first departure from south-east Europe. We have found reason for believing that before 3000 /B.C./, and probably for long before that date, the Wiros had been occupying the Russian steppes east of the Dnieper, and had perhaps wandered across the Volga into Turkestan. They were a nomad people, living, perhaps, partly by hunting, but mainly by herding cattle on the grassy steppes, and the parklands which fringed them on the north. They had tamed the horse, and held this animal in great veneration. Its name constantly occurs as part of their own names,[481] they rode it like cow-boys “punching” their cattle, and if we may judge from the habits of their descendants, it was what may be described as a cult animal.