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Archaeological discoveries indicate that a variety of economic models have operated in the inland areas of Asia. One of these models, pastoral nomadism, differs from agriculture, agro-pastoral, and settled pastoralism in terms of cattle-breeding, cultivation and manufacture. Pastoral nomadism is a livestock-breeding management mode of production, in which the stock is fed by uninterrupted moving in a large geographical area. The Eurasian Steppe, which includes the cold forest-steppe area in the north and the semi-arid desert-steppe in the south, is the major region in which the ancient nomadic population flourished. Because of the absence of both intrinsic motivation and external pressure for the transition to pastoral nomadism, early animal husbandry economy in the forest-steppe area could not have developed into the initial pastoral nomadic economy; instead, the pastoral nomadic economy emerged from the agro-pastoral economy in the semi-arid desert-steppe. These agro-pastoral people were forced to minimize the scale of agriculture and sedentary pastoralism and to turn to a nomadic lifestyle, with the internal cause being a shortage of feed resources caused by expansion of the human population and livestock, with the added external pressure of climatic and environmental deterioration. From archaeological findings, the eastern Tianshan area in Xinjiang, China, was a major region for the emergence of the early pastoral nomadic economy. The main evidence for this conclusion is a series of pastoral nomadic settlement sites in the northern and southern piedmonts of the Tianshan Mountains, which display settlement conditions, resources and environments entirely different from those of agricultural and agro-pastoral settlements elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]