Willkommen zu meinem Haus About 10,000 years ago, the Alpine glaciers advanced northward over the Bavarian plateau toward the site of present-day Munich. These solid rivers of ice - some as thick as 6,000 feet in depth - carved out the relief of the Alpine valleys as we know them today. The lakes of the Bavarian plateau, including those of the Salzkammergut region, were also created by the receding glaciers during this time. Germans, and other people who lived in what is now Germany and Eastern Europe, were Indo-Europeans, originally from the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Sometime between 3000 BC and 2000 BC, they had migrated gradually, in many different waves, out of that area and all across Europe. Some ended up north of Europe, in Scandinavia (modern Norway, Sweden and Denmark). These are the ancestors of modern Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes. Some went to Poland, where they developed into the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. Some ended up in Germany, where they are the ancestors of the modern Germans, but also of the Franks, Vandals, and Sueves.