ARYAN AGRICULTURE 



Most Important Plant and Animal Products of Europe Indigenous — Wheat and 

 Barley Cultivated 50,000 or More Years Ago — Horse the Latest of the Impor- 

 tant Animals to be Domesticated — Origin of the Plow. ^ 



Privatdozent Dr. Dettweiler 

 Inspector of Animal Husbandry , Rostock in Mecklenburg, Germany. 



as far as India. I can not now enter 

 into the details of this question. I must 

 ask you simply to accept it as a fact, 

 that the standpoint above sketched is 

 the correct one. According to it the 

 coast of the East Sea, perhaps with 

 Mecklenburg as its central point, is to 

 be considered the original home of the 

 Indo-Germans. But even here, they 

 were immigrants at a relatively late 

 day, and perhaps are merely descendants 

 of the people of the Stone Age, who lived 

 during the Glacial Period in southern 

 France and Spain, perhaps also on the 

 northern coast of Africa. In this con- 

 nection it must not be forgotten that 

 during the Ice Age the climate in that 

 region was milder — that is, cooler — ■ 

 than it is at present. It was only after 

 the ice had melted away in our latitude 

 that man ventured into the north. 



CROPS OF THE LAKE-DWELLERS. 



In order to have some secure stand- 

 point from which to handle our none 

 too simple data, it seems necessary to 

 take a definite cross-section of history, 

 and I shall therefore take the so-called 

 Age of the Lake-dwellings. It is fairly 

 known, even in details, is remote enough 

 to be included in the prehistoric period, 

 and yet has been so thoroughly inves- 

 tigated that , one can form a tolerably 

 clear picture of it. Its culture belongs 

 to the so-called Neolithic or later Stone 

 Age, extending perhaps up into the 

 Bronze Age, that is, about 2000 to 4000 

 years before Christ. 



I shall limit myself to a consideration 

 of the agriculture of this period. 



1 Address delivered before the Dozentenverein of Rostock; translated (and slightly abridged) 

 from the Illustrierte Landwirtschaftliche Zeitung, 32 Jahrgang, No. 81, p. 745, Berlin, 9 Oktober, 

 1912. 



473 



UP TO quite recently, it would 

 hardly have been possible to 

 write on the theme I have 

 chosen today, ' 'The Begin- 

 n ngs of Agriculture and Animal Hus- 

 bandry among the Indo-Germans." 

 For it used to be taken for granted that 

 Europe with its Indo-German popula- 

 tion received all its culture fromi Rome 

 and Greece, or from the Babylonian 

 Orient, and so it was quite useless to 

 concern one's self over such a problem 

 as I have just stated. The northern 

 European population passed for raw, 

 ignorant, wholly uncivilized — ^in a word, 

 they were barbarians, to whom the 

 higher civilization of the south and east 

 first brought the light of progress. Nay, 

 not only was the culture supposed to 

 have been imported from the outside, 

 but the population itself was held to 

 have immigrated from Asia. 



On all these questions the last two or 

 three decades have caused many re- 

 versals of position. Just as natural 

 science is today based on the idea of 

 evolution, so has the idea gradually 

 gained ground that the population of 

 Europe developed independently on its 

 own ground with its own culture — 

 more, that these have an antiquity 

 surpassing anything we know of Baby- 

 lon or Egypt. Today it is admitted — 

 except by a few — that the original home 

 of the primitive European population, 

 the Indo-Gennans, is not Asia but 

 Northern Europe, that they developed 

 their culture there in the late Stone 

 Age, and that they then dispersed in 

 their wanderings to the south and east. 



