Eurasian Steppe

The Eurasian Steppe is a vast belt of temperate grassland stretching roughly from Hungary in the west across Ukraine, southern Russia and Central Asia to Manchuria in the east, making it the largest continuous grassland region on Earth. Its open, largely treeless terrain historically supported highly mobile pastoral and nomadic cultures, and it served for millennia as a corridor along which peoples, goods and ideas moved between Europe and East Asia, including the trade routes later grouped together as the Silk Road. The steppe's grasses grow on some of the most fertile soils in the world, and large sections have since been converted to grain agriculture.