वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

432 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
howsoever interesting and instructive they may be from the lin-
guistic or the historical point of view, are apt to mislead us if we
know not the site of the original home, or the time when it was
inhabited or abandoned by the ancestors of our race. Compa-
rative Philology may teach us that cow was an animal known and
domesticated before the Aryan separation, or that the art of
weaving was known in those old days, because the words 'cow'
and 'weave' can be traced in all the Aryan languages. But it
is now found that equations like these do not help us much in
definitely ascertaining where the united Aryans lived and when
they separated; while recent researches in Archæology and
Anthropology have exhibited the improbability of a Central
Asian home of the Aryan races and successive migrations there-
from to European countries. The hypothesis of a Central Asian
home is, therefore, now almost abandoned; but strange to say,
that those, who maintain that Europe was inhabited at the
beginning of the Neolithic age by the ancestors of the races who
now inhabit the same regions, are prepared to leave undetermined
the question whether these races originated in Europe or went
there from some other land. Thus Canon Taylor, in his Origin
of the Aryans, confidently advises us that we need not concern
ourselves with the arguments of those who assert that Europe
was inhabited by the ancestors of the existing races even in the
Palæolithic period; for, says he, "philologists will probably admit
that within the limits of the Neolithic age, it would be possible
to find sufficient time for the evolution and the differentiation of
the Aryan languages."* In the last chapter of the same book
we are further informed that the mythologies of the different
branches of the Aryan race must have been developed after
their separation, and that resemblances, like Dyaus-pitar and
Jupiter, or Varuṇa and Uranus, must be taken to be merely
verbal and not mythological in their origin. In short, the

• See Taylor's Origin of the Aryans, p. 57.