THE RACES OF EUROPE

The names Danubian, Megalithic, and Corded, have been deliberately taken from archaeology since, as will be shown, the types so designated were closely linked, during the Neolithic and even later, to the cultural entities with which they are thus identified.

It is hoped that the use of these labels will eliminate the necessity, in the rest of this chapter, of elaborate description.

2. Iran and iraq

Unfortunately for the compiler of a general book, both the archaeology and the somatdlogy of the Iranian plateau and of Mesopotamia are in their respective infancies. City after city, and village after village, remain undug, while thousands of skulls, some excavated and discarded, and others still in the ground, remain unmeasured and unpublished. Despite the notable work done at al 'Ubaid, Kish, Ur, Warka, Susa, Persepolis, Rayy, and other sites, the archaeologists have not yet found the begin­nings of Near Eastern civilization. Until recently, no single unquestion­ably Neolithic site had been discovered in the whole of Asia Minor, Meso­potamia, or the Iranian plateau over to India; at present several sites have been located in Anatolia and Armenia.⁴ In the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, the Neolithic material, if it exists, must be buried by many feet of alluvial soil. In the eastern highlands, if it exists, it should not be hard to find. The difficulty is that no one has seriously looked for it. The claim of this whole highland and riverine zone to priority in the development of the Neolithic economy cannot yet be confirmed or refuted.

There is, however, another claimant equally lacking in credentials—the plain of west-central Asia, north of the plateau, and east of the Caspian. In the grasslands drained by the Oxus and Jaxartes the great nomadic cul­tures, associated with Indo-Aryan-speakers in the oldest traditional times, and later with the Turks, had their bed of germination. From this center, from time to time, invasions and migrations started in several directions. One was the movement of the Aryan ancestors into India, about 1400 B.C.; another the Iranian invasion of the plateau which bears the name and whose inhabitants speak the language of the invaders. A school, founded by the Indo-European philologists of the last century, and sup­ported, although with different dramatis personae, by the modern Turks, would make of these vast plains the germinating-bed of Old World food production.

Commencing with the Iranian plateau, we may consider skeletal ma­terial which antedates the arrival of the Iranian-speaking immigrants. Five crania from Luristan and the region directly to the north, in western

• Pittard, E., ASAG, vol. 7, 1937, pp. 389-391.

Field, H., AJSL, vol. 55, 1938, pp. 101-111.