asan—which is still the most fertile part of Persia, must have been formerly still more favorable to habitation. To the north of the plateau the lowland strip lying between the Kopet Dagh and the Inland Sea and extending eastward to lose itself in the valleys of the Murg-ab, Oxus, Zerafshan, and Syr-darya, has ever since the glacier time been occupied by a chain of gradually shrinking oases. There were, therefore, many provinces potentially capable of supporting and differentiating populations.
The field is great, and only awaits scientific exploration to throw a strong light into the anthropological and cultural beginnings of the ancient world. As far as our present knowledge goes, the earliest occurrence of organized town life with 'agriculture and breeding of animals is confined to long-headed people on the oases, with a strong presumption that all these cultural characteristics were originated by them. Although many millenniums have passed since the disappearances of the successive cultures of the North Kurgan, it should be difficult to suppose that the descendants of this oasis stock are not still represented among the settled peoples of Persia and India, modified in various degrees by fusions with Semites from the west and Turanians from the east, and perhaps with other stocks which may have shared the long isolation.
As has been already stated in the foregoing pages and on plate 5, there was a remarkable parallelism between the growth and disappearance of the successive cultures on the Anau oasis on the one hand and the favorable and unfavorable phases of the climatic cycles on the other hand, respectively.
The people of the second culture, who in the North Kurgan succeeded those of the first culture, being long-headed, were racially related to their predecessors, and their civilization, as shown in the burial of children in the houses and in their possession of agriculture, was of the same order. But the fact that they made an entirely different and more advanced pottery with a different scheme of painted ornamentation, and that they had a fuller knowledge of copper and new domestic animals, shows that they came from an oasis sufficiently distant to account for the differences in culture and in the varieties of domestic animals, for no remains of the dog nor of the goat nor of the camel were found by Dr. Duerst among the bones from the first culture. We have in this the evidence that the reaction of a deteriorating climate upon overcrowded populations had already set in motion migrations that were to result in the displacement or extermination of the weaker occupants of other oases.
The fact that these immigrants of the second culture brought with them both lapis lazuli and the camel makes it probable that the movement was from east to west, and the occurrence of bones of the turbary sheep at stations in Asia Minor is very possibly an indication that migrations of people of the oasis stock extended at least as far as the Mediterranean. The migrations of this period of unrest, in the first climatic cycle platted on plate 5, began, according to my chronology, at least about 6000 B. c. The founding of the South Kurgan and the continuance of its flourishing copper culture during thirty centuries shows that the climatic conditions of the favorable phase of the cycle may well have checked this early migratory movement.
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