Environment affects not only the way these people gain a living, but the very way they walk. Their everyday movements are enough to suggest that hill dances would be more lively than plains dances. Natural environment makes them even more different: with little level space to dance on, the hillman may develop only springing, leaping steps. On the broad village greens of the valley below, plainsmen have space for running dances, taking up a great deal of level ground.

Thus in the Bavarian mountains of southern Germany a popular folk dance in which men would throw their partners high in the air. On the level Russian steppes, dancers form a chain needing a large, flat space for its pattern of horizontal movements. Unconsciously man adapts himself, his way of life, and his dances to the particular environment in which he lives.

Dancing may have begun as a rhythmic expression of happiness, but it was rapidly put to "practical" use. If rains failed and fleet of animals fled to distant pastures, the hunter might starve. If wild pigs broke into his grain fields and ate the unripe harvest, the farmer might starve. Like his animal, prey and pests, early man was at the mercy of nature. What he could not make happen with his muscles' alone, he tried to effect with his mind. He imitated in a dance what he wanted to happen.

Before a hunt he mimed a hunt, including the killing of his prey. Many early magical dances probably began as pantomime rituals. The steps danced were important to man not because they were beautiful but because they meant something. They had always to be repeated in the same way for the spell to work. But, with the world's first civilizations, man's way of life changed.

Better food production, more specialized manufacturers and merchants, supported a leisured class of priests, nobles, and kings. With time, power, and money at his disposal, the king wanted entertainment. Dancing girls performed before him, inventing new, spectacular dances, acrobatic leaps, and handstands - all to please their royal patron. The steps they danced were not important because they had meaning, like those of magical dances in a primitive tribe, but because they were more graceful or skillful than those that ordinary people could perform.

Today we still find magical dances in lands where man does not benefit from modern discoveries in science and machinery, where he is unable to control nature's pests and plagues. We find spectacular dancing in lands where mechanization has produced a class of people with plenty of leisure time and money to spend on the enjoyment of watching experts paid to dance.