Were these people Celts or at least partially celticized? To express an opinion on a Celtic question is to accept an invitation to a Donnybrook fair. Anthropologically they differ markedly from the later Celtic invaders. But their custom of incineration is certainly suggestive, and it is not at all impossible that they spoke a Celtic dialect. They certainly seem to prove that the westward migration from the region of the Black Sea or from farther eastward had not ceased or been turned backward at this time. The spread of North German people southward at this time would have brought them where they would mingle with Celts coming westward and receive their first lesson in Indo-European language and culture, if it came from the east. There is at present a strong tendency to seek the original Indo-European homeland neither in the extreme east or extreme west or north, but somewhere in the open country of southern Russia lying to the north of the Black Sea or farther eastward toward the Caspian. Here they locate them mainly in a long zone of parkland extending along the southern edge of the forest zone and in the valleys of the great rivers. Here at a much later date Scythians were settled who raised large quantities of wheat, while others were nomadic. We remember that Neolithic trade-routes followed mainly rivers and seashore. The islands of the Mediterranean were occupied early and sea commerce found a centre in Crete. A great centre of trade arose very early at Troy (Hissarlik), on the highway between the Ægean and the settlements along the shores of the Black Sea and in the valleys of the rivers descending from the interior. Déchellette has called attention to the striking analogies in form of settlement, in primitive idols, in pottery with painting and spiral ornament between the villages of the Balkans, Troy (Hissarlik) and of the Troad and Phrygia, and of the pre-Mycenæan culture of Crete and Greece. "Between Butmir and Hissarlik these discoveries mark the routes which already undoubtedly connected pre-Hellenic peoples and pre-Celtic tribes." Meyer tells us that the banded pottery shows the same motives in ornament in Butmir and Tordos as in Troy and the Ægean, and spreads thence northward and westward; and that painted pottery in Europe starts at the end of the Neolithic (2500-2000 B. C.) in the great plain east of the Carpathians in the region of the Dniester and Dnieper, a region of high culture in other respects. "Here the connection with the Ægean world is evident (_augenfällig_)." This people was agricultural. They burned their dead, and Meyer thinks that incineration spread northward and westward from this centre. They show no use of metal. Their culture breaks off suddenly at the end of the Neolithic period.