After all the controversy about the Aryans it
seems clear that a powerful race, representing the ancestors of
most of the actual peoples of Europe and speaking the dialects
which have been modified into the related languages of the
Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, Lithuanians, etc., imposed its
speech on nearly the whole of the continent. Only in the Basques
and Picts do we seem to find some remnants of the earlier
non-Aryan tongues. But whether these Aryans really came from
Asia, as it used to be thought, or developed in the east of
Europe, is uncertain. We seem justified in thinking that a very
robust race had been growing in numbers and power during the
Neolithic Age, somewhere in the region of South-east Europe and
Southwest Asia, and that a few thousand years before the
Christian Era one branch of it descended upon India, another upon
the Persian region, and another overspread Europe. We will return
to the point later. Instead of being the bearers of a higher
civilisation, these primitive Aryans seem to have been lower in
culture than the peoples on whom they fell.
The Neolithic Age had meantime passed into the Age of Metal.
Copper was probably the first metal to be used.
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