Eurasian Steppe

The Eurasian Steppe, sometimes called the Great Steppe, is a belt of temperate grassland, savanna and shrubland stretching roughly 8,000 kilometers from Manchuria through Mongolia, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Hungary, making it the largest continuous grassland system in the world. Since the Paleolithic it has served as the principal overland corridor linking Eastern Europe, North Asia, Central Asia and East Asia, functioning as a predecessor of the Silk Road and, in the modern era, the Eurasian Land Bridge. Across its long history the steppe was home to a succession of nomadic empires and tribal confederations, among them the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Huns, various Turkic peoples and the Mongol Empire, whose horse borne mobility shaped Eurasian geopolitics and trade for millennia. Ecologically the steppe is dominated by open grassland with little tree cover, grading into forest along its northern edge and into desert to the south, and its wildlife includes Przewalski's horse, the saiga antelope, the gray wolf and Pallas's cat.