Prehistoric Movements of Caucasians and Mongols,
and their causes

(2) But another method can be applied to the East, and especially to the Pacific, and that is the method of inference from historical movements to prehistoric. If, for example, we can fix approximately the period when the Mongols began to migrate out of the central Asiatic plateau, we can define the time after which no great Caucasian migration could have made its way across the Northern great-stone route to the Pacific Period. As soon as the Turks and Finns began to move away from the head-waters of the Yenesei and the Irtish into the steppes on the Asiatic side of the Ural Mountains, the way was barred from Europe to the East; it was no longer an open route for the megalithic peoples from the west or south-west.

(3) It had been a migration road for displaced Mediterranean peoples during tens of thousands of years, in fact during page 40early palaeolithic times, and the retreat of the mammoth into sub-arctic regions; for the rude palaeolithic chipped weapons of man have been found alongside the remains of this huge animal in Southern Siberia. It became a high-road when one of the advances, probably the last, of the ice-sheet in the glacial age had begun to relax its grip on southern lands. The peoples driven by the northern blondes from the Mediterranean would naturally crowd the southern route to the East, as long as the glacial cold made the northern part of Central Asia uninhabitable. But as it receded they would find a way to the north-east, either along the north or the south of the Black Sea. It is not unlikely that at first an inland sea or inland seas filled the depression to the south of the Urals, and stretched far to the north and the east. But this would make, instead of an obstacle to these originally maritime peoples, an easier route and an inducement for them to pioneer in their boats till they struck the mountains again. But, as the sea dried up, and the central plateau rose and grew less inhabitable, the route from the south-west would close first; for the Mongols would press down primarily into the richer and more habitable lands to the east, south, and south-west. The pressure of population on the narrowing means of sustenance up on the Mongol plateau would be relieved earliest on its southern boundaries. And hence the primitive Mongol elements in India and Indo-China, and the Akkadian and Hittite empires in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris, and near the coast of the Mediterranean. These latter, along with the nomade people in the steppes to the north-east, would make the migration of the Mediterranean races east and north-east difficult, if not impossible.

(4) The northern route, when once it was opened after the final recession of the ice-sheet, would remain open much page 41later. The northern Mongols would be the last to move north-east, north, and north-west, because of the lack of rich countries and tribes to tempt them. Hence the evidences of blue-eyed peoples all along the north of Central Asia to the Pacific, and the rapid blanching of the Turks and the Finns by the conquest and absorption of Caucasians as they moved westwards. But these blonde Caucasians must have been an upper layer superimposed upon a darker stratum of longheads, and must have migrated eastwards in comparatively recent times, only a few hundreds or thousands of years before the Turki-Finn movement.

(5) If then we can fix approximately the period when one of the southern or eastern Mongol migrations took place, we may fix approximately, too, the time when the northern route was finally closed to Europeans.