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Page 2 of 7 Upper Paleolithic The beginnings of the modern population of Europe, of which the Germanic people are a part, came with the Upper Paleolithic period more than thirty thousand years ago when Europeoids replaced Neanderthals all across Europe. Europeoids are a regional population generally treated as a part of the broad category, Caucasoid, which includes also Mediterranoids, Indoids, and sometimes even Australoids, that is to say, any population that is not Mongoloid or Negroid (de Laubenfels, 1983). All of these regional variations of modern humans have developed gradually over time partly as a result of some degree of geographic isolation and are not generally sharply marked off from one another. That is, there have always been transitional and mixed individuals near where different populations approach one another. The Europeoids came to be substantially separated from their nearest neighbors, the Mediterranoids, by the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, and an enlarged Caspian Sea, as well as the glacially covered Caucasus Mountains, the Upper Paleolithic having been contemporary with the latter part of the last glacial epoch. The Europeoids had only a minimal contact with the Mongoloids in the desert and swamp-covered bleak heart of Eurasia north and east of the Caspian Sea.
Upper Paleolithic people were skillful hunters and gatherers who lived by necessity in small groups, too small to be a source for marriage partners within the functioning group. It follows that they were, and those hunters and gatherers still in existence continue to be, exogamous. That is to say, marriage partners were sought outside the family group in some other group. This constant exchange of individuals between groups had the effect of creating a web of genetic and cultural uniformity. Genes as well as language, and other cultural practices, were continually interchanged over broad territories. Because of the inter-connectedness of Upper Paleolithic societies, all across Eurasia and Africa philologists can detect relatively few widespread pre-agricultural language families, each in its particular region and one, two, or three for each broader regional population type mentioned above. The Upper Paleolithic lasted in Europe for about two dozen millennia at the end of which it looks like there were just three distinct language subdivisions there. In the tundra around the Scandinavian Ice-Cap were the Uralic people (Julku, 2002) called Ladogian by Coon, slightly different from the Cro- Magnon (1939). These were further divided into the ancestors of the Lapps (Sami) in the west, that is, England, France, Germany, and the now North Sea (modern Lapp survivors are a very mixed people); Finns in the middle, that is, Poland, Ukraine, and parts of Russia; and Ugrians in the general vicinity of the Ural Mountains. The forests of southwestern Europe were home of the ancestral Basque people, classical Cro-Magnons. In forested southeastern Europe, the third group probably was a main source for the Indo-European languages.
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Germanic Origins 
