Page:The Urantia Book, 1st Edition.djvu/959

 Rh The whole inhabited world, outside of China and the Euphrates region, had made very limited cultural progress for ten thousand years when the hard-riding Andite horsemen made their appearance in the sixth and seventh millenniums before Christ. As they moved westward across the Russian plains, absorbing the best of the blue man and exterminating the worst, they became blended into one people. These were the ancestors of the so-called Nordic races, the forefathers of the Scandinavian, German, and Anglo-Saxon peoples.

It was not long before the superior blue strains had been fully absorbed by the Andites throughout all northern Europe. Only in Lapland (and to a certain extent in Brittany) did the older Andonites retain even a semblance of identity.

The tribes of northern Europe were being continuously reinforced and upstepped by the steady stream of migrants from Mesopotamia through the Turkestan-south Russian regions, and when the last waves of Andite cavalry swept over Europe, there were already more men with Andite inheritance in that region than were to be found in all the rest of the world.

For three thousand years the military headquarters of the northern Andites was in Denmark. From this central point there went forth the successive waves of conquest, which grew decreasingly Andite and increasingly white as the passing centuries witnessed the final blending of the Mesopotamian conquerors with the conquered peoples.

While the blue man had been absorbed in the north and eventually succumbed to the white cavalry raiders who penetrated the south, the advancing tribes of the mixed white race met with stubborn and protracted resistance from the Cro-Magnons, but superior intelligence and ever-augmenting biologic reserves enabled them to wipe the older race out of existence.

The decisive struggles between the white man and the blue man were fought out in the valley of the Somme. Here, the flower of the blue race bitterly contested the southward-moving Andites, and for over five hundred years these Cro-Magnoids successfully defended their territories before succumbing to the superior military strategy of the white invaders. Thor, the victorious commander of the armies of the north in the final battle of the Somme, became the hero of the northern white tribes and later on was revered as a god by some of them.

The strongholds of the blue man which persisted longest were in southern France, but the last great military resistance was overcome along the Somme. The later conquest progressed by commercial penetration, population pressure along the rivers, and by continued intermarriage with the superiors, coupled with the ruthless extermination of the inferiors.

When the tribal council of the Andite elders had adjudged an inferior captive to be unfit, he was, by elaborate ceremony, committed to the shaman priests, who escorted him to the river and administered the rites of initiation to the "happy hunting grounds"—lethal submergence. In this way the white invaders of Europe exterminated all peoples encountered who were not quickly absorbed into their own ranks, and thus did the blue man come to an end—and quickly.

The Cro-Magnoid blue man constituted the biologic foundation for the modern European races, but they have survived only as absorbed by the later