The grassy steppe helped spread horses, wheels and Indo-European languages
Stretching from Ukraine across Russia and Kazakhstan to the mountain ranges of western China, the Great Steppe is the largest grassland region on Earth. Its open plains played a major part in spreading the horse, the wheel and the Indo-European family of languages across Eurasia.
A steppe is a plain of grass and shrubs with no closed forest except along rivers and lakes. Its climate sits in between: too dry for woodland, not dry enough for desert, usually with 250 to 500 millimetres of rain or snow a year. Extremes are brutal. Summer temperatures can hit 45 degrees Celsius and winter ones fall to minus 55, and on the highlands of Mongolia or in northern Nevada a 30-degree afternoon can be followed by a night below freezing. The Eurasian steppe often rests on chernozem, famously dark and rich soil.
Similar landscapes appear on every inhabited continent. Hungary sits at the heart of the Pannonian Plain, a Central European steppe spilling into neighbouring countries. North America's version is the prairie of the central United States, western Canada and northern Mexico, and the Columbia Plateau of the Pacific Northwest is another example. Cold steppe covers inner Anatolia, much of Armenia and Iran, and Patagonia east of the southern Andes. Smaller patches grow inland on New Zealand's South Island and in northern Victoria in Australia.
A drier subtropical form occurs where Mediterranean climates shade into desert, in central Sicily, southern Portugal, around Murcia in Spain and in rain-shadowed Zaragoza, as well as on Algeria and Morocco's Hautes Plaines, the fringes of India's Thar Desert and the Deccan Plateau behind the Western Ghats. In North America it marks the transition around Reno, inland California and western Texas.
People have reshaped these lands. The forest steppe of Eastern Europe took form in the fourth millennium BC alongside the Trypillia culture, whose large settlements very probably contributed. Poland's Błędów Desert, which formed in the Middle Ages, was certainly created by human activity.
Source: Steppe
