AUTHORS OF EARLY TAMIL CULTURE 27 that they were immigrants, and they did not speak an Aryan dialect. The assumption should then be that they were branches of the early Dravidian stock. Crete passed to iron with no break to bronze or copper. This is just what happened in India. India had no Bronze Age as such. If we take into consideration all these circumstances, and examine them criti. cally, one has to assume that the authors of these early cultures in the East Mediterranean were emigrants from South India speaking the Dravidian dialects. The language migrated and with it the peoples who spoke that language. So my humble thesis is that civilization of the future was born not on the shores of the Mediterranean but on the coasts of the Indian Peninsula and on the banks of its mighty rivers, the Kaveri, Tampraparni, the Periyar and Amaravati, not to speak of the Kistna, Godavari and Narmada. CONCLUSION Before I conclude I wish to say that I admit a Negroid strain in the original population of South India as represented by the hill and jungle tribes still with us. There are the survivals of the paleolithic man to whom stone was the soul and life of his culture. I would not contend the theory of immigrants from Africa, Australia, Malaysia, Asia Minor and the Aegean Basin even from prehistorical times. For I believe in cultural drifts from one place to another from earliest times. It is just possible that some of them settled in
