Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/359

 ASPECTS OF THE ARYAN QUESTION 345

Pyrenees show us that wheat was cultivated since the fifth inter- glaciary period, long before the polished-stone epoch. These same deposits furnish us examples of the fruits of the walnut, the plum, the cherry, and of other trees of alleged Asiatic origin, already improved by culture. The domestic animals of the neolithic period appear to be mostly of African origin, especially the cattle. Further, the polished stone hatchet was not an Asiatic importation. It is rare in Asia, where its introduction was relatively late. Its origin is African. Its evolution can be followed in the African paleolithic deposits from the acheuUen form to the most perfect form of the neolithic epoch. These various importations were made rather by the Mediterraneans.

Moreover, wherever we find the brachycephalic in the neo- lithic burial places, he appears only as an accessory or accidental element. It can no longer be doubted that the brachycephalic skulls of the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, for example, belonged to captives taken in war, for, as we shall see when we come to consider the matter more in detail, the sepultures of the lake- dwellers prove that that population was uniformly dolicho- cephalic.

Finally, in Asia itself we find no trace, either in Asia Minor or in Bactria, of an ancient brachycephalic Aryan civilization There was, indeed, a civilization, but it was not Aryan ; there were, indeed, brachycephalics, but they were not Aryans.

From all this may be drawn the moral of the unfitness of the term Aryan to describe a race of men in the physical or zoologi- cal sense. When the discussion is in regard to the Aryan civ- ilization, languages, religions, institutions, etc., the word, although inaccurate in so far as it confuses the part with the whole, is a convenient and necessary term. It is, therefore, permissible, when the point of view is philological or ethnographic, and in these connections it has come to have a fairly uniform signifi- cance. As regards physical type, however, the image evoked by the name Aryan differs according to the author that one reads. For Mortillet, Topinard, or Drumont, the Aryan is an averred brachycephalic, resembling the chestnut peddler on our streets or the typical peasant of Piedmont, Auvergne, or Savoy. If the