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

PREHISTORIC TIMES. . 17
with the potter's art and the use of metals. It is only in the
Neolithic period that we meet with pottery in the piled villages
of lake-dwellers in Switzerland. But even the oldest lake-dwellers
seem to have been unacquainted with the use of metals and
waggons, both of which were familiar to the undivided Aryans.
No trace of woollen cloth is again found in these lake-dwellings,
even when sheep had become numerous in the Bronze age. But with
these exceptions the culture of the Swiss lake-dwellings is con-
sidered by Dr. Schrader to be practically of the same character
as the culture common to the European members of the Indo-
Germanic family, and he, therefore, ventures to suggest, though
cautiously, that "from this point of view there is nothing to
prevent our assuming that the most ancient inhabitants of Switzer-
land were a branch of the European division" of the Aryan race.*
But though recent discoveries have brought to light these
facts about the human races inhabiting Europe in prehistoric
times, and though we may, in accordance with them, assume
that one of the four early Neolithic races represented the primitive
Aryans in Europe, the question whether the latter were autochth-
onous, or went there from some other place and then succeeded
in Aryanising the European races by their superior culture and
civilisation, cannot be regarded as settled by these discoveries.
The date assigned to the Neolithic period as represented by Swiss
lake-dwellers is not later than 5000 B. C., a time when Asiatic
Aryans were probably settled on the Jaxartes; and it is admitted
that the primitive Aryans in Europe could not have been the de-
scendants of the Palæolithic man. It follows, therefore, that
if we discover them in Europe in the early Neolithic times
they must have gone there from some other part of the
*Dr. Schrader's Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples,
translated by Jevons, Part IV. Ch. xi. p. 368.