Page 574 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION 355

do not help us much in definitely ascertaining where the united
Aryans lived and when they separated; while recent resear-
ches in Archrelogy and Anthropology have exhibited the im-
probability of a Central Asian home of the Aryan races and
successive migrations therefrom to European countries. The
hypothesis of a Central Asian home, is therefore, now almost
abandoned; but strange to say, that those, who maintain that
Europe was inhabited at the beginning of the Neolithic age by
the ancestors of the races who now inhabit the same regions,
are prepared to leave undetermined the question whether
these races originated in Europe or went there from some
other land. Thus Canon Taylor, in his Origin of the Aryans,
confidently advises us that we need not concern ourselves with
the arguments of those who assert that Europe was inhabited
by the ancestors of the existing races even in the Palreolithic
period; for says he, " philologists will probably admit that
within the limits of the Neolithic age, it would be possible to
find sufficient time for the evolution and the differentiation of
the Aryan languages."* In the last chapter of the same book
we are further informed that the . mythologies of the different
branches of the Aryan race must have been developed after their
separation, and that resemblances, like Dyaus-pitar and
Jupiter, or Varu~a and Uranus, must be taken to be merely
verbal and not mythological in their origin. In short, the advo-
cates of the Central Asian as well as of the northern European
home of the Aryans are both unwilling to carry back the beginn-
ing of the Aryan civilisation beyond post-Glacial times, and
we are told that Aryan mythology and religion cannot, there-
fore, claim any higher antiquity.
All such guesses and speculations about the origin of the
Aryan race and its civilization will have now to be revised in
the new light thrown upon the subject by the theory of the
Arctic home lin pre-Glacial times. We cannot now maintain
that primitive Aryans were a post-Glacial race, or that they
advanced from barbarism to civilisation in the Neolithic period
either in Central Asia or in the northern parts of Europe; nor
it is possible to argue that because the mythologies of the diffe_
rent branches of the Aryan race do not disclose the existence

• See Taylor's Origin of the Aryif.a, p. '57·