glorious Macedonian opponents from Thrace to Central Asia, of the magnificent Pazyryk kurgan burials in the Altai Mountains, of the warriors that served in every army of every important empire during a span of a millennia, of the creators of the Animal Art style dispersed from Enisei to Danube, and of the creators of many kingdoms and confederations. Not a bad record for a miniscule principality that remained utterly obscure canyon populace till the Russian colonization of the Caucasus and the rise of the German racial expertise brought it forward as a banner of the Indo-European greatness in the Euro-Asian steppes.

It is outstanding that every link in the Iranian-Scythian theory is either a fraud or a blunder. The Ossetians are not Alans, and it is not Ossetians whoto encircle an area in the steppe for a hunt, or used the hunting techniques to eradicate an enemy's army, or were known in China as Yancai, "Vast Steppe", one of four Hunnish tribes. And never were taken from the Ossets the fabled treasuries that even remotely resembled the treasuries of Roman, Byzantian and Persian goods like those documented as taken from the Avars, Bulgars, Kushans, Huns and Scythians when their capitals were overrun. The genetical assessment of the Ossetians in the work is not a last nail in the coffin of the ill theory, for in an unbiased science that nail would have been driven still in the 19th century. This genetical study merely joins all other converging facts that demonstrate the absurdity of the Scythian-Iranian postulation.

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