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resort the young. Such a condition they judge more happy than the painful occupation of cultivating the ground, than the labour of rearing houses, than the agitations of hope and fear attending the defence of their own property or the seizing that of others. Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished.
    Five centuries later, the northernmost dwellers on Earth were still provoking strong language from observers. Procopius of Caesarea was born and raised in Palestine. Remembered by history as one of the great Byzantine scholars, he accompanied General Flavius Belisarius during his campaigns on behalf of Emperor Justinian I. In his History of the Wars he found space for a description of the same people who had so appalled and captivated the Roman half a millennium before:
    But among the barbarians who are settled in Thule [the end of the Earth], one nation only, who are called the Scrithiphini, live a kind of life akin to that of the beasts. For they neither wear garments of cloth nor do they walk with shoes on their feet, nor do they drink wine nor derive anything edible fromthe earth. For they neither till the land themselves, nor do their women work it for them, but the women regularly join the men in hunting, which is their only pursuit. For the forests, which are exceedingly large, produce for them a great abundance of wild beasts and other animals, as do also the mountains that rise there. And they feed exclusively upon the flesh of the wild beasts slain by them, and clothe themselves in their skins, and since they have neither flax nor any implement with which to sew, they fasten these skins together by the sinews of the animals, and in this way manage to cover the whole body.
    The visitor from the shining city of Constantinople referred to the Saami as ‘Scrithiphini’, a Greek word that translates as ‘the skiing Finns’, revealing that a mode of transport so familiar today has been relied upon in the north for thousands of years.
    The Mesolithic hunters making inroads on Scandinavia from the south were therefore in the vanguard of a northward movement that had lasted for many generations, slowly reclaiming the land while the ice retreated. Much of Europe had been treeless for thousands of years before the newcomers’ arrival and instead of forest, a variety of open habitats had evolved ranging from tundra around the fringes of the ice itself to steppe lands of grass, mosses and herbaceous plants further south. Great herds of mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and bison had drifted across those vast expanses, migrating back and forth as the seasons demanded. There were wild horse and reindeer then as well, all prey to the hunters who went before: the men and women who lived and died during the latter millennia of the long period known to archaeologists as the Old Stone Age – or, more specifically, the 30,000 or so years of the Upper Palaeolithic.
    While the ice sheet was at its most advanced – and the climate at its worst – humanity had mostly retreated into the territoriesdescribed, rather grandly, as the Last Great Maximum Refugia, in places like the Balkans, Italy and parts of the Iberian peninsula. But from around 16,000 BC , as the climate began to improve, forest and open woodland spread northwards.
    Again this process lasted for thousands of years and all the while as the trees grew, the human populations evolved new hunting traditions. The mammoth and the woolly rhino had dwindled and then disappeared, driven to extinction. Other plains-loving species like elk and reindeer were pushed north in pursuit of the snow and ice – and, more importantly, the open, treeless spaces – that better suited them. In their place, finding shelter and cover in the dappled shadows of the woodlands, were red and roe deer, wild pigs, and also aurochs, the towering ancestors of modern cattle. It