COMPARISON OP CULTURES. 65
common agriculture, a rectangular construction of houses of air-dried bricks, the same spindle-whorls and mealing-stones and forms of flint implements, and exactly the same custom of burying children in a reclined contracted position under the house-floors. And since the peoples of culture II brought with them the domesticated dog, goat, and camel, which we may assume that they had themselves subjugated to their use, they had this achievement also in common with their predecessors, and they shared in a knowledge of copper.
The differences are due to independent culture evolution on separate oases of one or two groups ; but the points in common date from an earlier stage in the forming of groups, and they presuppose, beyond doubt, in the earlier stage, a long period of dwelling in houses, of knowledge of the potter's art and of spinning, and of agriculture. The peculiar burial custom probably dates from a still earlier and regionally more generalized culture.
When, now, we compare the succeeding culture (III) of the South Kurgan with its predecessors on this oasis, we find great changes. The skilfully made and painted pottery of the earlier peoples is supplanted by that made on the wheel; the mechanical production of variety in form has taken the place of the artist's brush and color-pot. Arrow-points of stone and copper appear, and objects that recall forms and cults of which we find traces in the remains of western antiquity. But underlying all these points of difference, there is throughout this culture the custom of burying children under the house-floor, which, I think, would alone class this people as belonging to the oasis-world. On the other hand, the points in which this culture differs from the preceding ones are probably due in part to progress through time, partly to independent development at a remote point before migrating to Anau, and partly again to intercourse with peoples who had been in contact with others who fashioned stone arrow-points ; for intercommunication was now rendered relatively easy through the camel and horse. There is no evidence of Mediterranean influence. The celt is wholly wanting, and in the copper weapons the absence of Mediterranean forms of corresponding age is marked.
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 many thousands of years. But, however far back this may go, the time-interval must have been far greater that elapsed between the culture that built houses, had the art of spinning and a developed technique in pottery and design, and that remote and generalized stage of humanity in which the stone arrow-point and ax were invented. All this points to a regionally widespread autochthonous culture evolution, owing its generic character to its early regional isolation and its differentiations to the segregation into separated groups imposed upon it by the regional progress of desiccation. In this respect it is a unique ethnographic province, in strong contrast on the one hand with the west, where early man could move freely throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor, and on the other with northern Asia and the Americas.
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 seeds of different grasses growing on the dry land and in marshes at the mouths of larger streams on the desert. With the increase of population
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