millennium BC, when neighbouring literate cultures came into contact with the people of the steppe. In the steppes north of the Black Sea and east of the Caspian Sea, Greek, Assyrian and Persian sources attest to horse nomads, which can be identified as speakers of Iranian languages. The first reports from ancient China of the nomads north of China date from the same period. Along with various unidentified groups from Shang and Zhou dynasty texts, the Xiongnu are worthy of mention. Based on personal names and titles transmitted by the Chinese sources, different scholars have attempted to identify the language of the Xiongnu as an early Turkic language, a proto-Mongolic language or a Yeniseian language. At the beginning of the early Middle Ages, the Iranian peoples disappeared and in their place Turkic peoples expanded across the region between the eastern edge of Europe and northeastern Siberia. In the areas to the north of the Asiatic steppes, speakers of Uralic and Palaeo-Siberian languages are suspected to have been settled; in the Middle Ages, Turkic peoples appear here as well, but their prehistoric extent is not clear. Cultures Siberia before the Chalcolithic The earliest known archaeological finds from Siberia date to the Lower Palaeolithic. In various places in West Siberia, the Baikal region and Yakutia, storage places from early Neolithic times have been found, which often remained in use for centuries. Alongside tent settlements which leave no traces in the ground, there were also huts, often dug slightly into the ground, whose walls and roofs were made of animal bone and reindeer antlers. Tools and weapons were mostly made from flint, slate and bone, with few discernable differences between them despite their immense chronological and geographical scope. In some settlements, early artworks have been found, which consist of human, animal and abstract sculptures and carvings. The Palaeolithic and Mesolithic inhabitants of Siberia were hunter-gatherers, whose prey consisted of mammoths and reindeer, and occasionally fish as well. In the 6th millennium BC, pottery spread across the whole of Siberia, which scholars treat as the beginning of the Siberian neolithic. Unlike Europe and the Near East, this event did not mark a major change in lifestyle, economy or culture. Hunter-gatherers in Yakutia and the Baikal region The prehistoric inhabitants of the vast areas of taiga and tundra east of the Yenissei and north of Baikal differ in many ways from the prehistoric cultures of