I'll tell you, one of my guilty pleasures used to be reading Robert E. Howard who wrote the original Conan the Barbarian books. The story goes that, even though he never traveled more than fifty miles from his home in Texas, REH wrote these remarkable stories about far off lands that he never visited and he managed to cook up his own early history where all of the peoples that we would recognize as distinct ethnic groups lived in their sort of specific parts of the world. He had Brythunians, Hykranians, Kushites, Vanirmen, Aquilonians and, of course, Cimmerians just to name a few...it was pretty easy to recognize which ethnic groups these folks "evolved" into. The whole thing was based on some historical and anthropological material so it was quite believable if contrived. These legends sound very much like ones that REH used to cook up his worlds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E_Howard

Best

AA