Dettweiler: Aryan Agriculture 



479 



PREHISTORIC AGRICULTURE 



Resident of the Bronze Age plowing with a yoke of oxen. 

 This engraving was made with flint on the carefuhy 

 smoothed wall of a cave near Bohuslan in southern 

 Sweden. It dates back probabh'' several thousand 

 years B.C., and possibly much earlier, according to 

 Braungart, from whom the cut is taken. The simplest 

 possible form of plow not operated by man alone is here 

 shown; it is still found, almost unchanged, among 

 modern Iranians in northern India. (Fig. 3.) 



knows the sober mind of the GeiTnanic 

 peoples must reject this hypothesis 

 absolutely and agree that utilitarian 

 motives alone acted. Instead of fol- 

 lowing wild animals with the hounds 

 all his life, man found it more convenient 

 to pen up the wild animals and feed 

 them. Further progress in breeding 

 came by its own momentum. 



Among dogs we find today a host of 

 varieties and types. That is partly due 

 to the diversity of the wild material — 

 wolves and jackals — which originated 

 them, in part to the extraordinary 

 variability of the species. Apparently 

 the dog is a product of the old Stone 

 Age. 



Cattle were probably — in part, cer- 

 tainly — domesticated in the first part 

 of the new Stone Age. The wild stock 

 was the Ur or Aurochs in various forms. 

 I have made a particular study of the 

 ancestry of cattle and especially of the 

 black and white race.* The literature 

 designates it as Bos taiirus germanicus , as 

 distinguished from the red breed, B. 

 taurus cehicus. The first is considered 

 to be a product of Germanic breeders, 



the latter of Celts. But when one 

 collects all the data regarding the 

 earliest known distribution of these 

 types, and compares it with the known 

 history of the peoples, one arrives at 

 quite an opposite conclusion. For the 

 black and white cattle are beyond all 

 doubt a heritage from the Celts, who in 

 those days lived to the east of the 

 Germanic peoples, in the present empire 

 of Russia, while the Germans had red 

 cattle with light muzzles and some- 

 times white spots. These two varieties 

 of cattle were distinct in origin and have 

 no connection with each other. From 

 the fact, however, that these two 

 neighboring peoples had different kinds 

 of cattle, we must conclude that the 

 domesticating of cattle went on in- 

 dependently in a number of separated 

 districts, at a date subsequent to the 

 separation of Celts from Germans and 

 after the art of agriculture was tolerably 

 well known. It was not until much 

 later that the Celtic tribes, wandering 

 westward, took their black and white 

 cattle with them, and from the dis- 

 tribution of these cattle during historic 



Represented in the United States principally by Holstein-Friesian cattle. 



