The Arctic Home in the Vedas c16.16.3

c16.16.3

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.”¹ 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 advocates of the Central Asian as well as of the northern European home of the Aryans are both unwilling to carry back the beginning of the Aryan civilisation beyond post-glacial times, and we are told that Aryan mythology and religion cannot, therefore, claim any higher antiquity.