Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/346

 The Dravida race once possessed all India from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, and spread also across the Indus out to Beloochistan. Invaded by the immigrating Aryans, they were forced southward, until finally they contracted their limits within the southern half of the Indian Peninsula, the so-called Deccan.

That this race formerly reached so far northward as we have indicated is proved by the Brahuis in Beloochistan, whose existence in this country can only be accounted for by such an hypothesis. The beginning of the migrations of the Dravida race coincides with the appearance of the Aryan in the Punjaub and may be placed somewhere about the year 2000 B. C.

Central Asia must be considered the early home of the so-called Mongolian, more properly Upper Asiatic race. From this point this race radiated in all directions, but predominantly to the east and south. The leading people of this race, the Chinese, according to ancient traditions, came from the west into the great valleys of the Hoang-ho and Yang-tse-Kiang. But before them this region was already occupied by another people, as their vestiges, seen in the so-called Miao-tse, demonstrate. This stem is not, as we know now, a member of a distinct race, but only of a separate people, and is allied to the people of upper India, especially to the Thai. Thus, before the migration of the Chinese, itself hidden in a gray antiquity, there took place another migration of the aborigines of China belonging to this same race.

The inhabitants of Japan are also not autochthonous, but have immigrated from the west. They found on their settlement here natives who were, in their physical features, very distinct from the intruders. Indeed, the fact that in the southern districts the color of the skin of the inhabitants is dark, and their hair somewhat curly, points to a mixture with a darker race. It is not improbable that the Papuan race, whose existence on the Philippine Islands, and perhaps also on Formosa, has been established, diffused themselves originally as far as Japan.

The migration of the Upper Asiatic race to the west must have begun early, as we already find in the far past the Lapps and Finns in northern and northeastern Europe, peoples belonging to this race. It is not improbable that this race before the entrance of the Celts into Europe occupied the entire north and northeast, and possibly also a great part of central Europe. Many writers consider the people who used unpolished stone implements and weapons, found in northern and middle Europe, as being a branch of the Mongolian race.

Hence Europe may have been inhabited by only two races before the entrance of the Indo-Europeans, which latter is coincident with the appearance of the Etruscans and Celts, viz., by the Basques and Ligurians—a people of unknown ethnological character in the south, and the Upper Asiatic stems in the north. This settlement of the Upper Asiatic race in Europe, long before the immigration of the