The amount of intermixture and intermediacy on the south {16} side of the mountain axis is less marked, for here there were not the same occasions for mingling of small groups. The broad-headed stocks have, however, spread downhill, and occupy a great deal of North Italy. They are of less consequence in the Iberian Peninsula; the Balkan Peninsula is and probably has been their home from early times. A broad-headed stock with markedly dark colouring and frequently massive build is found on coastal patches here and there along the Mediterranean shores and on the coasts of Western Europe. It occurs as an important percentage in many coastal communities, and is almost certainly composed of survivors of prospectors and traders of the dawn of the Bronze Age and some later periods. These few references must suffice to illustrate the kind of modification which the early and fundamental racial distribution has undergone; it may be condensed into the statement that broad-headedness has on the whole spread downhill, and has increasingly limited long-headedness to the fringes of Europe. It has done this not so much by sheer replacement of population as through its biological advantage of dominance over long-headedness in many cases of mixture. There has, however, been a definite spread of people of broad-headed type into the Russian plain, as well as many movements of peoples, to some of which we get references in the early chapters of written history. 2 _Language Families--Introductory_ The languages of the European peoples are to a large extent grouped into Celtic, Romance, Teutonic, and Slavonic families, all of which have sufficiently similar features to be classed together with Sanskrit as Indo-European or, to use a much-disputed term, Aryan. Asiatic immigrants into Europe both in Arctic regions {17} and on the steppes of South Russia have brought in Asiatic languages which have managed to persist as far west as Lapland, Finland, Esthonia, and Hungary, but they are not sufficient to affect the general statement. The prior home of the Indo-European languages has been discussed almost _ad nauseam_, and it is still so unsettled a question as to make it unprofitable to discuss afresh whether that home was on the Asiatic steppe, in the mountain and plateau country from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, on the grassland borders of South Russia, or somewhere near the Baltic. It would at any rate seem that these languages did not originate in the Mediterranean, and that the languages of that region in pre-classical times were of other affinities. Minoan, Etruscan, &c., are still undeciphered. If then the classical languages came into that region from outside, the probabilities are that they came in from the north, where are found related languages which have certainly not come from the Mediterranean.