National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

In considering the observed data of the earliest of the Anau cultures in their
ethnographic relations, one must be struck by a singular fact: They had none of the
usual weapons of stone for offense and defense; the cores from which they made the
abundant flakes of flint, probably for sickles, arouse our wonderment at the absence
of the arrow-points, spear-heads, and celts found in almost all advanced stone-age
and æneolithic settlements. Now axes, spear-points, and arrow-points of stone
are, throughout the rest of the world, abundant where primitive man has existed;
and in the improvement in the manner of their fashioning they serve to mark off
the long stages in the slow development of primitive human culture. The evolu-
tion of these implements, from the almost natural shape to highly finished forms
specialized for different uses, was exceedingly slow. This has been proved at
several points in Europe, where they have been found in deposits of different
epochs of the glacial period, and intimately associated with undoubtedly contem-
poraneous animals of those epochs; and the progress in time is paralleled by the
improvement in workmanship. So true is this considered to be that in studying
in Europe successive stages, glacial and interglacial, of the glacial period, the
evolution of forms and of workmanship in the stone implements, when such are
found, is only second in value to the bones of those animals with which the imple-
ments are associated, and which mark the long oscillations between subtropical
and arctic climates. The early use of stone as a tool, and the slowly developing
inventive faculty, at last rendered possible during interglacial time the manufacture
of finely formed axes and spear- and arrow-points. These were acquisitions that
stood causally and first in human development, in the same order with the dis-
covery of the use of metals, powder, and steam. It is not conceivable that a people
who had once possessed this acquisition, and had used axes and arrow-points and
spear-points of stone, could have lost the advantage these offered. This would be
still more remarkable in the case of our Anau-li, who, though settled in communi-
ties, still hunted wild animals, and who had quartzite close at hand, as well as
access to the flint of which are found the flakes in such abundance, and the cores
from which they were flaked. I see no way of accounting for the absence of these
forms of implements and weapons except on the hypothesis that the ancestors of
this people had become absolutely isolated from the rest of mankind at a period so
remote as to be before the invention of these forms, and they must have remained
without contact with peoples using these implements and weapons.

The next and necessary deduction under this hypothesis is that the whole of
their culture is autochthonous in the sense that it received no impulses from out-
side the people, or circle of peoples, so isolated. It presupposes an early separa-
tion of a great inner-continental region from the rest of the inhabited world.

I imagine that the cause of this separation is to be sought in one of the stages
of the glacial period, when the region, considered as a whole, became isolated, as
far as human intercourse was concerned. Moreover, after this it probably took
a long time for the reaction from the conditions induced by the ice-epoch to make
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