THE ARYAN QUESTION AND PREHISTORIC MAN. 503 



mediate affluents, poured their waters. In addition, it received 

 the overflow of Lake Balkash, then much larger ; and, probably, 

 that of the inland Sea of Mongolia. At that time the level of the 

 Sea of Aral stood at least sixty feet higher than it does at pres- 

 ent.* Instead of the separate Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas, 

 there was one vast Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean, which must 

 have been prolonged into arms and fiords along the lower valleys 

 of the Danube, the Volga (in the course of which Caspian shells 

 are now found as far as the Kuma), the Ural, and the other afflu- 

 ent rivers while it seems to have sent its overflow northward 

 through the present basin of the Obi. At the same time, there 

 is reason to believe that the northern coast of Asia, which every- 

 where shows signs of recent slow upheaval, was situated far to 

 the south of its present position. The consequences of this state 

 of things have an extremely important bearing on the question 

 under discussion. In the first place, an insular climate must be 

 substituted for the present extremely continental climate of west 

 central Eurasia. That is an important fact in many ways. For 

 example, the present eastern climatal limitations of the beech 

 could not have existed, and if primitive Aryan goes back thus 

 far, the arguments based upon the occurrence of its name in some 

 Aryan languages and not in others lose their force. In the second 

 place, the European and the Asiatic moieties of the great Eura- 

 siatic plains were cut off from one another by the Ponto-Aralian 

 Mediterranean and its prolongations. In the third place, direct 

 access to Asia Minor, to the Caucasus, to the Persian highlands, 

 and to Afghanistan, from the European moiety was completely 

 barred ; while the tribes of eastern central Asia were equally 

 shut out from Persia and from India by huge mountain ranges 

 and table-lands. Thus, if the blond long-head race existed so far 

 back as the epoch in which the Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean had 

 its full extension, space for its development, under the most favor- 

 able conditions, and free from any serious intrusion of foreign ele- 

 ments from Asia, was presented in northern and eastern Europe. 



When the slow erosion of the passage of the Dardanelles 

 drained the Ponto-Aralian waters into the Mediterranean, they 

 must have everywhere fallen as near the level of the latter as the 

 make of the country permitted, remaining, at first, connected by 

 such straits as that of which the traces yet persist between the 

 Black and the Caspian, the Caspian and the Aral Seas respectively. 

 Then, the gradual elevation of the land of northern Siberia, bring- 

 ing in its train a continental climate, with its dry air and intense 

 summer heats, the loss by evaporation soon exceeded the greatly 



* This is proved by the old shore-marks on the hill of Kashkanatao in the midst of the 

 delta of the Oxus. Some authorities put the ancient level very much higher two hun- 

 dred feet or more (Keane, Asia, p. 408). 



