it will be sufficient for our present purpose to state the conclusion
to which the evidence points.


Provisional Conclusion

Pending the discovery of decisive evidence, the following provisional
conclusion has much to recommend it--namely, that the ancestors
of the Chinese people came from the west, from Akkadia or Elam,
or from Khotan, or (more probably) from Akkadia or Elam _via_
Khotan, as one nomad or pastoral tribe or group of nomad or pastoral
tribes, or as successive waves of immigrants, reached what is now
China Proper at its north-west corner, settled round the elbow of
the Yellow River, spread north-eastward, eastward, and southward,
conquering, absorbing, or pushing before them the aborigines into
what is now South and South-west China. These aboriginal races, who
represent a wave or waves of neolithic immigrants from Western Asia
earlier than the relatively high-headed immigrants into North China
(who arrived about the twenty-fifth or twenty-fourth century B.C.),
and who have left so deep an impress on the Japanese, mixed and
intermarried with the Chinese in the south, eventually producing the
pronounced differences, in physical, mental, and emotional traits,
in sentiments, ideas, languages, processes, and products, from the
Northern Chinese which are so conspicuous at the present day.



Inorganic Environment

At the beginning of their known history the country occupied by the