TURKESTAN AND IRANIA 665 



intimately associated with undoubtedly contemporaneous animals of 

 those epochs, and in all cases the progress in time is paralleled by the 

 improvement in workmanship. 



So true is this considered to be, that in studying these successive 

 stages, glacial and interglacial, in Europe, of the Glacial period, the evo- 

 lution of forms and of workmanship in the stone implements, when such 

 are found, is only second in value to the bones of those animals with 

 which the implements are associated and which mark the long oscillation 

 between subtropical and arctic climates. 



The early use of stone as a tool and the slowly developing inventive 

 faculty at last rendered possible the manufacture of finely formed axes 

 and spear and arrow points. These were acquisitions that stood casually 

 and first in human development, in the same order with the discovery of 

 the use of metals, powder, and steam. 



It is not conceivable that a people who had once possessed this acquisi- 

 tion and had used axes and arrow-points and spear-points of stone could 

 have lost the advantage these offered. This would be still more remark- 

 able in the case of our Anauli, who, though settled in communities, still 

 hunted wild animals and who had quartzite close at hand, as well as the 

 flint of which are found the knives in such abundance and the cores from 

 which they were flaked. 



I see no way of accounting for the absence of these forms of imple- 

 ments and weapons except on the hypothesis that the ancestors of this 

 people had become absolutely isolated from the rest of mankind at a 

 period so remote as to be before the invention of these forms and perhaps 

 even before the use of stone as a tool. 



And they must have remained without contact with peoples among 

 whom these implements and weapons were in use. 



The next and necessary deduction under this hypothesis is that the 

 whole of their culture is autochtonous, in the sense that it received no 

 impulses from outside the people or circle of peoples so isolated. 



It presupposes an early separation of a great inner continental region 

 from the rest of the inhabited world. 



I imagine that the cause of this separation is to be sought in one of 

 the stages of the Glacial period, when the region, considered as a whole, 

 became isolated as far as human intercourse was concerned. Moreover, 

 after this it probably took a long time for the reaction from the condi- 

 tions induced by the- ice-epoch to make much progress in breaking up the 

 continuity of the loess-steppes and to widen the distance between hab- 

 itable areas. 



