The ancestry of modern Iberians (comprising the Spanish and Portuguese) is consistent with the geographical situation of the Iberian Peninsula in the south-west corner of Europe. As is the case for most of the rest of Southern Europe, the principal ancestral origin of modern Iberians are Early European Farmers who arrived during the Neolithic. The large predominance of Y-Chromosome Haplogroup R1b, common throughout Western Europe, is testimony to a considerable input from various waves of (predominantly male) Western Steppe Herders from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe during the Bronze Age[3][4] Similar to Sardinia, Iberia was shielded from settlement from the Bosporus and Caucasus region by its western geographic location, and thus has lower levels of Western Asian and Middle Eastern admixture than Italy and the southern Balkan Peninsula, most of which probably arrived during historic rather than prehistoric times, especially in the Roman period.[5][6]