ABSTRACT
I f the later Mesolithic saw any fresh arrivals in their neighbourhood, these might more plausibly be sought within the Tardenoisian. The change to Atlantic climate brought on really dense growths of forest on the heavier soils almost all over Europe, sharpening the contrast between these thick mixed woodlands and the thin-soiled open tracts which mainly supported Tardenoisian man, and with its onset his microlithic cultures are found in uniform development from south-east to west, right across the North European plain. In the caves of the Crimea the eastern counterpart of the Azilian gives place to a true Tardenoisian with advanced forms of geometric microlith (p. 59), and similar cultures are dis tributed over the Ukraine, Volhynia, Poland, and East and North-Central Germany. It was in this stage that the Tardenoisian influenced the Gudenaa and Ertebolle cultures of the north, and though all evidence for its bearers has perished save their flints, it is probable that their distribution is of underlying importance for the ensuing problem of the relations between North-Central Germany and the South Russian steppe. This whole range of Mesolithic development had a common Palaeolithic basis in the East-Gravettian type of culture (pp. 30-35) from which East-Central and Northern Europe had been successively brought into connexion with the steppe-land corridor out of Asia, and in the developed Tardenoisian, so remarkably uniform from South Russia to Germany, may lie hidden the final ethnic contributions to the folk for whom not only Nordic race, but Aryan language, will be claimed in a later chapter.
