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56 ' ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF THE TAMILS Ceylon, the Andamans and Java. This shows that the Eolithic Culture was the prevailing culture common to all the areas of the then ancient world. (Prehistoric India by Panchanan Mitra, p. 138 ff: History of Pre-Musalman India, Vol. I by V. Rangacharya, pp. 29-32). 2. Sir J. G. Frazer gives this caution about the interpretation of the legends of the Great Flood; 'For it is certain that legends of a great flood are found dispersed among many diverse peoples in distant regions of the earth, and so far as demonstration in such matters is possible, it can be demonstrated that the similarities which undoubtedly exist between many of these legends are due partly to direct transmission from one people to another, and partly to similar, but quite independent, experiences either of great floods, or of in many phenomena which suggested the occurrence of great foods, in many different parts of the world. Thus the study of these traditions, quite apart from any conclusions to which it may lead us concerning their historical credibility, may serve a useful purpose if it mitigates the heat with which the controversy has sometimes been carried on, by convincing the extreme partisans of both principles that in this as in so many other disputes the truth lies wholly neither on the one side nor on the other, but somewhere between the two.' Man, God and Immortality, pp. 49-50. 3. See Dikshitar, The Matsya Purāna : A Study, pp. 1-19. The Sumerian epic of the creation and the deluge tells us that the earth-goddess and the earth-god helped by Anu, the heaven-god, and Enki, the water-god, fashioned the darkheaded people,' evidently meaning their own ancestors the Sumeriaos. (Langdoo, Sumerian Bpip of Paradise, the Flood and the Fall of Man, Philadephia, 1915, p. 17). In this congestion the remarks of Rev. Fr. H. Heras may be noted :