The area in Europe where the Nordic race developed and in which the Aryan languages originated probably included the forest region of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, together with the grasslands which stretched from the Ukraine eastward into the steppes south of the Ural. From causes already mentioned this area was long isolated from the rest of the world and especially from Asia. When the unity of the Aryan race and of the Aryan language was broken up at the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, wave after wave of the early Nordics pushed westward along the sandy plains of the north and pressed against and through the Alpine populations of central Europe. Usually these early Nordics, as indeed many of the later ones, constituted only a thin layer of ruling classes and there must have been many countries conquered by them in which we have no historic evidence of their existence, linguistic or otherwise. This must have certainly been the case in those numerous instances where only the leaders were Nordics and the great mass of their followers slaves or serfs of inferior races. The Nordics also swept down through Thrace into Greece and Asia Minor, while other large and important groups entered Asia partly through the Caucasus Mountains, but in greater strength they migrated around the northern and eastern sides of the Caspian-Aral Sea. That portion of the Nordic race which continued to inhabit south Russia and grazed their flocks of sheep and herds of horses on the grasslands were the Scythians of the Greeks and from these nomad shepherds came the Cimmerians, Persians, Sacæ, Massagetæ and perhaps the leaders of the Kassites, Mitanni and other early Aryan-speaking Nordic invaders of Asia. The descendants of these Nordics are scattered throughout Russia but are now submerged by the later Slavs. Well marked characters of the Nordic race, which were established in Neolithic times if not earlier, enable us to distinguish it definitely wherever it appears in history and we know that all the blondness in the world is derived from this source. As blondness is easily observed and recorded we are apt to lay too much emphasis on this single character. The brown shades of hair are equally Nordic. When the Nordics first enter the Mediterranean world their arrival is everywhere marked by a new and higher civilization. In most cases the contact of the vigorous barbarians with the ancient civilizations created a sudden impulse of life and an outburst of culture as soon as the first destruction wrought by the conquest was repaired.