Page:History of Early Iran.pdf/22

6 promise of great things to come in history. It was far more suited to "food-gatherers" than to "food-producers," for it was a land adapted to the grazing of animals rather than to the tilling of the soil. Nevertheless, its influence goes back to prehistory, and this influence demands present consideration.

Flint implements of Middle Paleolithic types have been found in central Iran, northeast of modern Shiraz, near the shores of what may have been a large sweet-water lake in those times. It has been suggested that Paleolithic man passed through the valleys of southern Iran in a general northwesterly direction and entered Kurdistan through the gorges at Sulaimaniyah, Rowandiz, and points north. Artifacts of Mousterian man, very similar to others discovered in Palestine, have been found in caves near Sulaimaniyah. Although the evidence is incomplete, it is sufficient to suggest that occupation of the caves was contemporaneous with the last glacial advance. It can be only an accident that other Mousterian implements have not been reported from diverse sites in Iran, for they have been discovered throughout all Europe in the west, through Africa, Palestine, India, even to Manchuria. Aurignacian man, successor to the declining Mousterian, seems also to have found a home in the Zagros, as he did in other parts of the