[Sidenote:  Pastoral nomads of Arctic plains.]

Aridity is not the only climatic condition condemning a people to nomadic life.  Excessive cold, producing the tundra wastes of the far north, has the same effect.  Therefore, throughout Arctic Eurasia, from the Lapp district of Norway to the Inland Chukches of eastern Siberia, we have a succession of Hyperborean peoples pasturing their herds of reindeer over the moss and lichen tundra, and supplementing their food supply with hunting and fishing.  The reindeer Chukches once confined themselves to their peninsula, so long as the grazing grounds were unexhausted; but they now range as far west as Yakutsk on the Lena River, The Orochones of the Kolima River district in eastern Siberia, who live chiefly by their reindeer, have small herds.  A well-to-do person will have 40 to 100 animals, and the wealthiest only 700, while the Chukches with herds of 10,000 often seek the pasture of the Kolima tundra.[1052] Farther west, the Samoyedes of northern Siberia and Russia and the Zirians of the Petchora River range with their large herds northward to the Yalmal Peninsula and Vaygats Isle in summer, and southward in winter. [See map pages 103, 225.] Here a herd of fifty head, which just suffices for the support of one family of four souls, requires 10 square versts, or 4.44 square miles of tundra pasturage.[1053] Hence population must forever remain too sparse ever to attain historical significance. [See map page 8.] The Russian Lapps, too, lead a semi-nomadic life.  Each group has a particular summer and winter settlement.  The winter village is located usually inland in the Kola Peninsula, where the forests lend shelter to the herds, and the summer one near the tundra of the coast, where fishing is accessible.  In winter, like the nomads of the deserts, they add to their slender income by the transport of goods by their reindeer and by service at the post stations.[1054]

[Sidenote:  Historical importance of steppe nomads.]

These nomads of the frozen north, scattered sparsely over the remote periphery of the habitable world, have lacked the historical importance which in all times has attached to the steppe nomads, owing to their central location.  The broad belt of deserts and grasslands which crosses the old world diagonally between 10 deg. and 60 deg.  North Latitude from the Atlantic in Africa to the Pacific in Asia, either borders or encompasses the old domains of culture found in river oases, alluvial lowlands or coastal plains of the Torrid and Temperate Zones.  The restless, mobile, unbound shepherds of the arid lands have never long been contained by the country which bred them.  They have constantly encroached upon the territory of their better placed neighbors, invading, conquering, appropriating their fields and cities, disturbing but at the same time acquiring their culture, lording it over the passive agriculturists, and at the same time putting iron into their weaker blood.  It is the geographical contact between arid steppes and moist river valley, between land of poverty and land of plenty, that has made the history of the two inseparable.[1055]