668 E. PUMPELLY EVOLUTION OF OASES AND CIVILIZATIONS 



We are thus carried back two stages in the progress of differentiation 

 of oasis groupings beyond the founding of our earliest culture at Anau ; 

 and I think most modern ethnologists will agree that this means periods 

 of thousands of years. But, however far back this may go, the time 

 interval must have been many times greater that elapsed between the 

 culture that built houses, had the art of spinning and a developed tech- 

 nique in pottery and design, and that remote and generalized stage of 

 paleolithic humanity in which the stone arrow-point and axe were un- 

 known. 



All this points to a regionally widespread autochthonous culture evolu- 

 tion, which owed its generic character to its early regional isolation and 

 its differentiations to the segregation into oasis groups imposed upon it 

 by the regional progress of desiccation. 



In this respect it is a unique ethnographic province and stands in 

 strong contrast on the one hand with the West, where early man could 

 move throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor, and with northern 

 Asia and the Americas. 



Origin op Agriculture and op organized settled Society 



With the gradual shrinking in dimensions of habitable areas and the 

 disappearance of herds of wild animals, man, concentrating on the oases 

 and forced to conquer new means of support, began to utilize the native 

 plants, and from among these he learned to use the seeds of different 

 grasses growing in the dry land and in the marshes at the mouths of 

 larger streams on the desert. 



With the increase of population and its necessities, he learned to plant 

 the seeds, cnus making, by conscious or unconscious selection, the first 

 step in the evolution of the whole series of cereals. 



For a long time the rainfall was doubtless sufficient to ripen grains, 

 as it still is in some of the valleys of Ferghana, and in some years even 

 at Samarkand. 



■Later, experience taught the need, and some simple method, of arti- 

 ficial watering, and in this acquisition lay the germ of agriculture and 

 of the conquest of the arid regions of the globe. 



In Asia it rendered possible the civilizations of Elam and Meso- 

 potamia. All the really great prehistoric cultures were developed in 

 arid regions — all of those of which we have knowledge, and perhaps 

 others of which we have not yet found the remains, in Mongolia, Arabia, 

 and the Sahara, while in America we have an instance in Peru. The 



