Environment, in fact, can only give the hint; and man may not be ready to take it.
The forest-land of the north affords fair hunting in its way, but it is doubtful if it is fitted to rear a copious brood of men, at any rate so long as stone weapons are alone available wherewith to master the vegetation and effect clearings, whilst burning the brushwood down is precluded by the damp.

Where the original home may have been of the so-called Nordic race, the large-limbed fair men of the Teutonic world, remains something of a mystery; though it is now the fashion to place it in the north-east of Europe rather than in Asia, and to suppose it to have been more or less isolated from the rest of the world by formerly existing sheets of water.

Where-ever it was, there must have been grassland enough to permit of pastoral habits, modified, perhaps, by some hunting on the one hand, and by some primitive agriculture on the other.

The Mediterranean men, coming from North Africa, an excellent country for the horse, may have vied with the Asiatics of the steppes in introducing a varied culture to the north.
At any rate, when the Germans of Tacitus emerge into the light of history, they are not mere foresters, but rather woodlanders, men of the glades, with many sides to their life; including an acquaintance with the sea and its ways, surpassing by far that of those early beachcombers whose miserable kitchen-middens are to be found along the coast of Denmark.
Of the tundra it is enough to say that all depends on the reindeer.
This animal is the be-all and end-all of Lapp existence.

When Nansen, after crossing Greenland, sailed home with his two Lapps, he called their attention to the crowds of people assembled to welcome them at the harbour.