However this may be, it seems clear that the peoples of Europe in the Aurignacian and the next following ages (Solutrean and Magdalenian) were long-headed, with varied accompanying characters which may still be seen nowadays. Those were ages of intermittent retreat of the Ice Sheets which had for ages previously made Europe so inhospitable to mankind, but at the end of the Magdalenian Age the snow line definitively crept up the mountain sides to something like its present level, and the mountain regions were made available for a beginning of human occupation. The coming of broad-headed men, probably from Asia Minor, then less divided from Europe, is characteristic of this period of change, and the mountain axis of Europe has ever {13} since been a region of broad-headed men, separating provinces of long-headed men to the north around the Baltic and (for a time) in Russia, and to the south around the western Mediterranean, then becoming increasingly cut off from tropical Africa by the supervention of desert conditions, in place of grassland, in what we now call the Sahara. The long-headed men around the Baltic and in early prehistoric Russia became, in course of time, what is called the Nordic race, and those around the western Mediterranean, with allied elements in the Aegean Isles, the Mediterranean race. In both cases they include survivors of the Combe Capelle type, and in the latter at least some of the Grimaldi type as well, and they are both still long-headed, though in both there has been a general, if slight, rounding of the head, so that it is less long and narrow than it was in early times. In the cool and cloudy north, with long continuance of the open-air life, sex maturity has come late, growth has been long continued, muscularity and the accompanying roughness of bone have been maintained and even developed, the nose has grown long and narrow, and with it the face has lengthened, the colouring has become fair. In the sunny south the settled life is of old standing, and sex maturity comes early. Growth is not so long continued, muscularity is less developed, and the tendency is towards smoothness of bone, the nose and face are moderate, the colouring is rather dark.