At both its western and eastern extremes some 10,700 km apart in France and the Russian Far East respectively, the great, fused supercontinent of Eurasia breaks into fragments, into not quite matching fringes of islands.
In the east, there are the likes of Hainan, Taiwan, the Japanese archipelago and the Kuril Islands; while off the western mainland lie the British Isles, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands and Iceland.
In both the east and the west, settlement of these outlying fringes by humans seems to have taken place over an extended period of several millennia, with colonists coming largely from the nearby continent.