CENTRAL ASIA The racial history of this vast central area is obscure. Up to the present, despite much archaeological work, excavators have concentrated rather on the history of the last 2,000 years than on the prehistoric period. In support of the theory that man originated in this region, Dr. Davidson Black concludes that the differentiation of the earliest human stock from the common ancestors of the anthropoid apes and man may be correlated with the progressive changes which occurred in Central Asia during recent geological periods—recent, that is, in relation to the history of life on the earth, though in actual years the period is one of remote antiquity. In the Eocene period, during which the London Clay and the Paris beds were laid down, Central Asia was low-lying and covered with semi-tropical rain-forest. During the succeeding geological periods the country became slowly higher and drier until in the Pleistocene it became a region of open plains, with only small forests. These changes either started or at any rate encouraged the separation of the prehuman stocks into two divisions, one of which, the archaic, became the ancestor of the modern anthropoid apes, and the other, the progressive, the ancestor of man. So far there is no direct evidence of this attrac tive theory.
No human fossils have as yet been found in Central Asia. Peres Licent and Teilhard have, however, explored certain palaeolithic sites in the great Ordos bend of the Hwang Ho (Yellow River).
Here at various depths under the loess they found hearths and the implements of palaeolithic man, belonging to the middle and upper divisions of that period associated with the bones of prehistoric animals. They conclude from the evidence so far discovered that man was living in this region during and possibly before the forma tion of the loess, which seems to correspond to the latest stages of the glacial epoch of Europe and North America. Dr. N. C. Nelson has collected implements and pottery from the succeeding periods. They are believed to belong to the Mesolithic and Neolithic epochs. So far, however, the complete racial history cannot be written. The Chinese claim to have originated in the Tarim basin, at a period when that region was less inhospitable than now. There they developed an oasis culture and subsequently migrated down the Wei Ho into the plain of China. (See CHINA, section Ethnol ogy.) There are reasons for believing that at one time the people who may have been the ancestors of the Nordic race of Western Europe were widely distributed, certainly over northern and pos sibly over Central Asia. It seems difficult to account for the present distribution of peoples of the Far East without believing that there was at one time a continuous distribution of Yellow Man over the Far East, due probably to a migration which sepa rated the various divisions of the Proto-Nordic stock. Then, owing to ethnic movements of the peoples now known as Turks and Mongols, Yellow Man was separated into two great divisions and Central Asia became the home of tribes who, although they have mixed considerably with Yellow Man show affinities rather with the West than with the East.
The inhabitants of Central Asia, excluding the Chinese who form no inconsiderable proportion of the population, may be divided into two main groups, Turks and Mongols, who, while differing in some respects, on the whole present many close resem blances ; indeed some of the characters which are considered by Czaplicka to form some of the most marked characters of the Turks are in some places at least equally characteristic of t. Mongols.
Apart from the two great religions of Islam and Buddhism, a good deal of Shamanism survives among the Mongols (q.v.). The most noticeable feature of their religious life is, however, the ex traordinary hold that Buddhism has had on these people, trans forming the whole of their life and possibly being responsible for the great change that has come over Central Asia since the days of the great Khan. Buddhism has transformed one of the most warlike people in the world into a small and until recently an en tirely dependent nation.
In Central Asia a great ebb and flow of peoples has taken place. During the Ming dynasty most of Inner Mongolia was cultivated by the Chinese in a region which to-day is most typical nomad territory. At present the Chinese agriculturalists are advancing again and driving the nomads back. This ebb and flow has been a practically continuous process, but the sudden incursions of the nomads into cultivated land have produced at various times some of the most cataclysmic movements of history.