At some period in human history (see Elliot Smith’s _Migrations of Early Culture_) there seems to have been a special type of Neolithic culture widely distributed in the world which had a group of features so curious and so unlikely to have been independently developed in different regions of the earth, as to compel us to believe that it was in effect one culture. It reached through all the regions inhabited by the brunet Mediterranean race, and beyond through India, Further India, up the Pacific coast of China, and it spread at last across the Pacific and to Mexico and Peru. It was a coastal culture not reaching deeply inland. (Here again we cover the ground of Huxley’s “belt of brown-skinned men,” and extend it far to the east across the stepping-stones of Polynesia. There are, we may note, some very striking resemblances between early Japanese pottery and so forth and similar Peruvian productions.) This peculiar development of the Neolithic culture, which, Elliot Smith called the _heliolithic_[75] culture, included many or all of the following odd practices: (1) circumcision, (2) the very queer custom of sending the _father_ to bed when a child is born, known as the _couvade_, (3) the practice of massage, (4) the making of mummies, (5) megalithic monuments[76] (_e.g._ Stonehenge), (6) artificial deformation of the heads of the young by bandages, (7) tattooing, (8) religious association of the sun and the serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol known as the swastika (see figure) for good luck. This odd little symbol spins gaily round the world; it seems incredible that men would have invented and made a pet of it twice over. Elliot Smith traces these practices in a sort of constellation all over this great Mediterranean-Indian Ocean-Pacific area. Where one occurs, most of the others occur. They link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this constellation of practices does not crop up in the primitive homes of Nordic or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward much beyond equatorial Africa. For thousands of years, from 15,000 to 1000 B.C., such a heliolithic Neolithic culture and its brownish possessors may have been oozing round the world through the warmer regions of the world, drifting by canoes often across wide stretches of sea. And its region of origin may have been, as Elliot Smith suggests, the Mediterranean and North-African region. It must have been spreading up the Pacific Coast and across the island stepping-stones to America, long after it had passed on into other developments in its areas of origin. Many of the peoples of the East Indies, Melanesia and Polynesia were still in this heliolithic stage of development when they were discovered by European navigators in the eighteenth century. The first civilizations in Egypt and the Euphrates-Tigris valley probably developed directly out of this widespread culture.[77] We will discuss later whether the Chinese civilization had a different origin. The