Note 236 — Chapter IV · —The Movements Of Peoples In Their Geographical Significance

In view of the countless springs and tributaries that combine to swell the current of every historical movement, anthropo-geography looks for the origin of a people not in a narrowly defined area, but in a broad, ill-defined center of dispersion, from which many streams simultaneously and successively flow out as from a low-rimmed basin, and which has been filled from many remoter sources. Autochthones, aborigines are therefore merely scientific tropes, indicating the limit beyond which the movement of people cannot be traced in the gray light of an uncertain dawn. The vaguer and more complex these movements on account of their historical remoteness, the wider their probable range. The question as to the geographical origin of the Aryan linguistic family of peoples brings us to speculative sources, more or less scientifically based, reaching from Scandinavia and Lithuania to the Hindu Kush Mountains and northern Africa.236 The sum total of all these conjectural cradles, amounting to a large geographical area, would more nearly approximate the truth as to Aryan origins. For the study of the historical movement makes it clear that a large, highly differentiated ethnic or linguistic family presupposes a big center end a long period of dispersion, protracted wanderings, and a diversified area both for their migrations and successive settlements.