Page 227 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

14 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 a THE ARCTIC HOME

had become numerous in the Bronze age. But with these excep-
tions the culture of the Swiss lake-dwellings is considered by Dr.
Schrader to be practically of the same character as the culture
common to the European members of the Indo-Germanic family,
and he, therefore, ventures to suggest, though cautiously, that
" from this point of view there is nothing to prevent our assum-
ing that the most ancient inhabitants of Switzerland were a branch
of the European divison " of the Aryan race.*
But though recent discoveries have brought to light these
facts about the human races inhabiting Europe in pre-historic
times, and though we may, in accordance with them, assume
that one of the four early Neolithic races represented the primi-
tive Aryans in Europe, the question whether the latter were auto-
chthonous, or went there from some other place and then succeed-
ed in Aryanising the European races by their superior culture and
civilization, cannot be regarded as settled by these discoveries. The
date assigned to the Neolithic period as represented by Swiss lake-
dwellers is not later than 5000 B. C., a time when Asiatic Aryans
were probably settled on the Jaxartes, and it is admitted that the
primitive Aryans in Europe could not have been the descendants
of the Palreolithic man. It follows, therefore, that if we discover
them in Europe in the early Neolithic times they must have gone
there from some other part of the globe. The only other alter-
native is to assume that one of the four Neolithic races in Europe
developed a civilisation quite independently of their neighbours,.
an assumption, which is improbable on its face. Although,.
therefore, we may, in the light of recent scientific discoverie,s
give up the theory of successive migrations into Europe from a
common home of the Aryan race in Central Asia in early times,
yet the question of the primeval home of the Aryan race, a
question with which we are mainly concerned in this book, still
remains unsolved. When and where the primitive Aryan tongue
was developed is again another difficult question which is not
satisfactorily answered. Canon Taylor, after comparing the
Aryan and Ural-Altaic languages, hazards a conjecture that at
the close of the reindeer, or the last period of the Palreolithic
age, a Finnic people appeared in Western Europe, whose speech

• Dr. Schrader's Pre-historic Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples.
tranlated by Jeyons, Part IV, Ch. xi, p. 368.