Research Items

Abstract

THE ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN.—In the Smithsonian Report for 1923 (dated 1925), Dr. Aleš Hrdlička, after setting forth the grounds for his view that the American Indian is a race, homogeneous on the whole, which penetrated the continent from Asia through the north-west in relatively modern times, goes on to discuss the chronology of this intrusion and the relative priority of the various types of the Indian race. He points out that the remains, archaeological and skeletal, of north-eastern Asia are of no great antiquity, but correspond generally to those of the Old World Neolithic age. The palaeolithic remains of the Yenisei and north - western China are thousands of miles away from the point where man crossed to America. This leads to the presumption that man did not cross over before late Palaeolithic or early Neolithic times. This would give a date of about ten or at most fifteen thousand years ago. Even if the unlikely hypothesis were accepted that man of north-eastern Asia had an independent development from European late Palaeolithic or Neolithic man, his advent from southern Asia could not have been earlier than if he had come from the west. Mass migration being impossible owing to the difficulties of climate and food supply, the people must have passed over in small groups. Of these, the first would be the dolichocephalic Indian represented by the Algonquian, Iroquois, Sioux, and Shoshonean stocks which spread to Tierra del Fuego, including the Lagoa Santa race. Next came the “Toltec” type marked by brachycephaly, settling along the north-west coast and reaching as far as Peru. Later came the Eskimo and Athapascan, the former spreading over the far north and becoming the most highly specialised of American types, while the Athapascan, a virile brachycephalic type which may have preceded the Eskimo, is the most closely allied of all to the prevailing Mongolian type of northeastern Asia. The path of the Athapascan was blocked and they remained in Alaska, except for a few who passed along the west coast to Mexico, where they left the Hupa, and to New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and tracts of northern Mexico, where they are known as the Apache.