The mountain belt is throughout its entire length the home of
round-headed peoples, the so-called Alpine race, which is generally
supposed to have originally come from the high plateau country of Asia.
These round-headed men in western Europe appear where-ever there are
hills, throwing out offshoots by way of the highlands of central France
into Brittany, and even reaching the British Isles. Here they
introduced the use of bronze (an invention possibly acquired by contact
with Egyptians in the near East), though without leaving any marked
traces of themselves amongst the permanent population. At the other
end of Europe they affected Greece by way of a steady though limited
infiltration; whilst in Asia Minor they issued forth from their hills
as the formidable Hittites, the people, by the way, to whom the Jews
are said to owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, noses. But are
these round-heads all of one race? Professor Ridgeway has put forward
a rather paradoxical theory to the effect that, just as the long-faced
Boer horse soon evolved in the mountains of Basutoland into a
round-headed pony, so it is in a few generations with human
mountaineers, irrespective of their breed. This is almost certainly
to overrate the effects of environment. At the same time, in the present
state of our knowledge, it would be premature either to affirm or deny
that in the very long run round-headedness goes with a mountain life.
The grassland next claims our attention. Here is the paradise of the
horse, and consequently of the horse-breaker. Hence, therefore, came
the charging multitudes of Asiatic marauders who, after many repulses,
broke through the Mediterranean cordon, and established themselves
as the modern Turks; whilst at the other end of their beat they poured
into China, which no great wall could avail to save, and established
the Manchu domination. Given the steppe-country and a horse-taming
people, we might seek, with the anthropo-geographers of the bolder
sort, to deduce the whole way of life, the nomadism, the ample food,
including the milk-diet infants need and find so hard to obtain farther
south, the communal system, the patriarchal type of authority, the
caravan-system that can set the whole horde moving along like a swarm
of locusts, and so on. But, as has been already pointed out, the horse
had to be tamed first. Palaeolithic man in western Europe had
horse-meat in abundance. At Solutre, a little north of Lyons, a heap
of food-refuse 100 yards long and 10 feet high largely consists of
the bones of horses, most of them young and tender. This shows that
the old hunters knew how to enjoy the passing hour in their improvident
way, like the equally reckless Bushmen, who have left similar Golgothas
behind them in South Africa. Yet apparently palaeolithic man did not
tame the horse. Environment, in fact, can only give the hint; and man
may not be ready to take it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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