The New Stone Age in Northern EuropeTyler, John M. (John Mason)
History
The New Stone Age in Northern Europe
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Stone age -- Europe
The Indo-Europeans were settled in a goodly land capable with their
improved agriculture of supporting a very large population. Why did they
migrate in all directions? Here, again, we are left much in the dark.
But Pumpelly, in his explorations at Anau, found the settlement deserted
during the Bronze period about the same time when we find the
Indo-Europeans leaving the homeland. At Anau there are signs that the
desertion was due primarily to aridity or to disturbances accompanying
such a change. It seems highly probable that climatic changes may have
played a most important part in this movement, as they seem to have done
in the later historical migrations from this region or from farther
eastward.
We may close this chapter of uncertainties with one deduction which
seems fairly evident. If the Germans were the first and original
Indo-Europeans, the movement developed here directly out of preceding
Neolithic conditions. If, as seems more probable, it originated farther
to the southeast, and was introduced by the Celts, or in connection with
the amber trade, it made little marked interruption in the development
of the Germans. They and the Scandinavians continued to take from the
south whatever they would, but their development was largely
independent. A complete conquest of Germany and Scandinavia by the Celts
seems very improbable.
The Teutonic and Scandinavian peoples were not precocious, and appear in
history very late. But here apart, in the misty northland, a people was
very slowly developing who, after the decadence and fall of Rome, could
come forward and slowly and wearily rebuild a civilization better than
that which had fallen, and a government of, by, and for the people,
guaranteeing to the individual the right of free action and development,
the grandest feature of Indo-European culture. This, rather than any
precocity, is the glory of the northern peoples. Once again we find
history in the making in an inconspicuous people during an apparently
dormant period.
He that believeth will not despise the day of small things, neither will
he make haste. If the vision tarries long, he will wait for it. "It
shall come and shall not tarry." It will probably come by the way which
he least suspects.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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