Page:Origin and spread of the Tamils.djvu/77



66 ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF THE TAMILS of the map of neolithic India is enough to prove that the country was thickly populated by people of one homogeneous form of culture and that the people ought to have been autochthonous, as the Tamil people have always claimed to be in the traditions recorded in their ancient literature. In the most ancient layers of the Tamil language can be discovered not only ample traces of neolithic culture, but also the birth of the Iron Age culture that succeeded it." Wournal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Vol. XXIV, pp. 41-42), 20. Among others Rai Bahadur Sarat Chandra Roy is the supporter of the theory of a proto-Dravidian race. He says that on the basis of the true aborigines of India who belonged to the racial type of the Indian Proto-Australoid, allied to the Semangs of Malaya and the Mincopis of the Andamans, and which was supplemented by a Melanesian strain there came an early branch of the Mediterranean race who brought with them a rudimentary knowledge of culture, the practice of Urn-Burial, the erection of rude stone memorials for the dead, neolithic implements, the art of navigation and a new speech. The main body of this new race occupied Peninsular India which was then perhaps sparsely inhabited by the pre-Dravidians and by some remnants of the original Negritos. It is very difficult to accept this view. 21. Dr. Macleane has almost hit at the right point when he divides the people of South India into Tamilians and Pre-Tamilians. The differences were not racial but cultural. Every age points to the growth and development of Tamil culture from the rude stone implements and cairns down to the marked civilization of the Sangam and post-Sangam period. The Tamits have no tradition whatsoever that they were an alier people who migrated to the Indian peninsula at a remole period of their history. On the other hand there