250. Europe
With Greece we have entered the realm of what is conventionally regarded as history. For the rest of Europe, prehistoric archæology and its record of illiterate peoples abut so closely on history in the ordinary sense, that a tracing of the transition takes one promptly into documentary study. There is much in this early historical field that is of anthropological interest, and just back of it lies more that is specifically so: where the round headed peoples came from who began to appear in Europe during the Neolithic; whether peoples like Ligurians, Sicilians, Scythians, were Indo-Europeans or not, and of what branch; where the blond Nordic type took shape and whether it originally spoke dialects of the Germanic group; who built Stonehenge and the other megalithic monuments of western Europe; where the first home of the Indo-Europeans lay. But such problems are intricate, and usually answerable, if at all, from stray indications scattered among masses of literary and historical data controllable only by the specialist, whose primary interests tend in other directions. Where these documented indications fail, the problems become speculative. We have no clear record of any indubitable Indo-European people, in or out of Europe, before the second millenium B.C. When they appear in history, they are already differentiated into their familiar main divisions. The Bronze Age Scandinavians seem likely to have been Indo-Europeans and perhaps of the Germanic branch; for the Neolithic an identification would be mere guessing. The LaTène Iron culture is characteristically Keltic, that of the Hallstadt period and area less certainly Illyrian and Keltic. And after all, such considerations concern speech, or race, which can be associated with any culture. Our present concern being primarily with the latter, it will be more profitable to pass on from these questions and turn to regions remote from those in which Occidental civilization assumed its modern form.