374 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 194 7 



nished the necessary stimulation discouraging human energy neither 

 by its enervating warmth nor its paralyzing cold. 



Without denying that climatic influences played a part here, atten- 

 tion should be called to one other factor not as yet sufficiently empha- 

 sized. This is the possibly relative nearness of the Old World cultural 

 centers to the original home of mankind. It might naturally be as- 

 sumed that in moving outward from any given center the tribes which 

 went farthest would have least leisure in which to make themselves at 

 home in their environment and build up elaborate adjustments, i. e., 

 civilizations, within it. But when we note that, although the New 

 World was populated at a late period, centers of civilization not much 

 inferior to those in the Eastern Hemisphere had appeared there in a 

 relatively brief section of the human time scale, we are warned against 

 laying too much stress on this particular factor. However, it remains 

 true that Old World civilizations lay in regions where some of the 

 oldest human skeletal material has come to light. Other materials of 

 this kind, including the Piltdown man of England, the remains of 

 early man in South Africa, and Pithecanthropus erectus, are remote 

 from these centers, but if a point is selected central to the area 

 determined by them and as nearly equidistant as possible from them it 

 will bring us to southwestern Asia and India. It is, admittedly, much 

 too early to dogmatize as to the earliest home of our race. Asia, 

 Africa, and Europe each has its champions, and at any moment some 

 new discovery may incline the weight of evidence to an entirely unex- 

 pected quarter. The onlv thing that seems reasonably certain is that 

 mankind is of Old World provenience. However, southwestern Asia 

 and India happen to lie about midway of the oldest human remains. 



Central Asia has been one of the spots most favored by searchers 

 for human origins. It attained its first prominence as a result of the 

 early studies of Indo-European lang-uages, although of course the 

 speakers of those languages were only a portion of the human race, and 

 in more recent times it has been recognized that the spread of languages 

 and the spread of peoples may follow entirely different paths. Never- 

 theless, Central Asia was taken up by the biologists, particularly 

 mider the stimulus of the late Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn and his 

 followers, and still exerts a powerful influence among both biologists 

 and anthropologists. It was made to fit very neatly into the wave 

 theories of race movement of such men as Griffith Taylor, and seemed 

 to be strengthened markedly by the discovery of China man. 



At this point, however, we may introduce another line of evidence 

 which m^y have some bearing upon the question. In the evolution 

 of animal forms it is usually assumed that the generalized types pre- 

 ceded the specialized, and that the main stem of evolution consisted 

 of forms retaining the ability to adapt themselves to a greater range 

 of situations than the rest. The specialized forms given off by these 



