<P> The earliest documented Turkic peoples appear as nomadic tribes on the plains of the Far East north of the Great Wall of China, which was constructed as a fortified border essentially between Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE) China (though started earlier) and the Xiongnu . </P> <P> The population ancestral to the Turks is thought to have included the Xiongnu of Mongolia or along the upper Yenisei in Siberia (the area of the contemporary Tuvan language), known from historical sources . The Han chronicle of the Xiongnu, included in the Records of the Grand Historian of the second century BCE, traces a legendary history of them back a thousand years before the Han to a legendary ancestor, Chunwei, a supposed descendant of the Chinese rulers of the Xia dynasty (c. 2070--c. 1600 BCE). Chunwei lived among the "Mountain Barbarians" Xianyun or Hunzhu . Xianyun and Hunzhu's names may connect them to the Turkic people, who later were said to have been iron - workers and to have kept a national shrine in a mountain cave in Mongolia . </P> <P> Apparently the Xiong - nu comprised a number of tribes and geographic groups, not all of which were probably Turkic (considering the later mixed ethnicity). The Records of the Grand Historian mention the Mianshu, Hunrong and Diyuan west of Long; the Yiqu, Dali, Wiezhi and Quyan north of the Qi and Liang mountains and Jing and Qi Rivers; the Forest Barbarians and Loufan north of Jin and the Eastern Barbarians and Mountain Barbarians north of Yan . Later the treatise mentions others . </P> <P> There were apparently many of the latter . At the end of the Xia, about 1569 BCE by the reckoning of the Records of the Grand Historian, the Chinese founded a city, Bin, among the Rong tribe of barbarians . In 1269 the Rong and the Di forced the relocation of Bin . About 1169 BCE the Quanyishi tribe was attacked by the Zhou Dynasty, which in 1159 forced all the barbarians into "the submissive wastes" north of the Jing and Luo Rivers . In 969 BCE "King Mu attacked the Quanrong and brought back with him four white wolves and four white deer ..." The early Turkic peoples believed that shamans could shape - shift into wolves . </P>

When did turkic peoples migrate to the anatolian peninsula