prove the former presence of the migrating folk in the
intervening territory. A dolichocephalic substratum of population, with
a negroid type of skull, has in fact been traced by archaeologists all
over Europe through the early and late Stone Ages. The remains of these
aboriginal inhabitants are marked in France, even in sparsely tenanted
districts like the Auvergne Plateau, which is now occupied by the
broad-headed Alpine race; and they are found to underlie, in point of
time, other brachycephalic areas, like the Po Valley, Bavaria and
Russia.[235]

The origin of a people can be investigated and stated only in terms of
geography. The problem of origin can be solved only by tracing a people
from its present habitat, through the country over which it has
migrated, back to its original seat. Here are three geographical
entities which can be laid down upon a map, though seldom with sharply
defined boundaries. They represent three successive geographic
locations, all embodying geographic conditions potent to influence the
people and their movement. Hence the geographical element emerges in
every investigation as to origins; whether in ethnology, history,
philology, mythology or religion. The transit land, the course between
start and finish, is of supreme importance. Especially is this true for
religion, which is transformed by travel. Christianity did not conquer
the world in the form in which it issued from the cramped and isolated
environment of Palestine, but only after it had been remodelled in Asia
Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and cosmopolized in the wide contact of
the Mediterranean basin. The Roman speech and civilization, which spread
through the Romance speaking peoples of Europe, were variously diluted
and alloyed before being transplanted by French, Spaniard and Portuguese
to American shores, there to be further transformed.

[Sidenote: Large centers of dispersion.]

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