Southern Origin Improbable

But this latter route would present many difficulties; it would seem
to have been put forward merely as ancillary to the theory that the
Chinese originated in the Indo-Chinese peninsula. This theory is
based upon the assumptions that the ancient Chinese ideograms include
representations of tropical animals and plants; that the oldest and
purest forms of the language are found in the south; and that the
Chinese and the Indo-Chinese groups of languages are both tonal. But
all of these facts or alleged facts are as easily or better accounted
for by the supposition that the Chinese arrived from the north
or north-west in successive waves of migration, the later arrivals
pushing the earlier farther and farther toward the south, so that the
oldest and purest forms of Chinese would be found just where they are,
the tonal languages of the Indo-Chinese peninsula being in that case
regarded as the languages of the vanguard of the migration. Also, the
ideograms referred to represent animals and plants of the temperate
zone rather than of the tropics, but even if it could be shown, which
it cannot, that these animals and plants now belong exclusively to the
tropics, that would be no proof of the tropical origin of the Chinese,
for in the earliest times the climate of North China was much milder
than it is now, and animals such as tigers and elephants existed in the
dense jungles which are later found only in more southern latitudes.


Expansion of Races from North to South

The theory of a southern origin (to which a further serious objection