A Potpourri of Races
The theories of Dixon and Hooton and others conflict in many places; but they present, on the whole, an arresting and convincing case for early man as a predecessor of the Mongoloids and as quite a different sort of creature. There are many side issues to the general theory, and they increase as we begin to deal with living peoples. Hooton finds close resemblances to Egyptian skulls among the Arizona Basket Makers and in the Coahuila Caves of northern Mexico,[10] and Dixon identifies ancient Egyptian skulls with skulls from California and skulls of the Iroquois. W. W. Howells sees similarities between “many forest tribes of South America and certain Indonesian groups in Borneo and the Philippines,” and believes the non-Mongoloid features of the Indians point, “not to the Australoids or the Negroes, but towards the White group.”[11] Hooton finds Indians of the Northwest coast who “resemble Alpine Europeans.” He says that certain Plains Indians seem to be basically White with Mongoloid added, and he points out that although the Eskimo are the most Mongoloid of all the inhabitants of the Americas, they are long-headed, which is a most un-Monogoloid trait.[12] On the basis of skulls from Chancelade, France, and certain late-paleolithic traits, Sollas saw the ancestors of the Eskimo living in Europe in Magdalenian times.[13] M. R. Harrington also picks a Magdalenian forebear for the Eskimo.[14] Authorities differ as to whether the Botocudo tribe of Brazil is descended from the people that left their skulls in the Lagoa Santa caves, but on the basis of R. N. Wegners description of a Bolivian tribe, the Qurunga, Griffith Taylor believes these people may be living representatives of an early Australoid migration.[15] Hooton puts forward the picturesque and amusing theory that the Maya, with their large, curved noses and their mania for flattening their heads between boards, picked up both the nose and the mania from the Armenoids of the Iranian plateau. The Mongoloids provided the characteristic skin, hair, and eyelids.[16]
The backwardness of certain living American tribes suggests to Sauer that they came to the New World a very long time ago. Their lack of a number of useful skills argues that they branched off from the men of the Old Stone Age when the Australoid ancestors of the abysmal Blackfellows of Australia looked like an up-and-coming people. These early men had the enterprise to reach the New World, but they stuck to old and limited habits of life. They would not learn from new invading peoples, and so they were forced into refuge areas as remote as Newfoundland, Lower California, Amazonia, and Tierra del Fuego. As an example of cultural backwardness and of an inability to learn which recalls the Australians, Sauer cites a people in the Brazilian interior who get along without boiling any of their food. He believes that this tribe acquired its cultural habits in the days before man began to put heated stones into water in pitch-sealed baskets. The primitive resistance of these “Indians” to borrowing new cooking skills like boiling comes out in other directions. “Long in contact with pottery-making peoples, they make casual or no use of pots, but restrict their cooking to roasting and baking, with gourds, a late acquisition, used for carrying water.”[17]
Griffith Taylor once wrote to Earl W. Count that, because certain of the now extinct mammals inhabited both sides of Bering Strait in the days of the glaciers, “it is almost impossible that the Australoids (who preyed on them) did not cross into America in Pre-Würm times.” Count supports Taylor with the suggestion that the most primitive of the many stocks that invaded the Americas came “at a time, say, when Talgai man and Wadjak man were en route to their cul de sac in Australia.”[18]
Radical as these last two suggestions are in point of time, they are conservative compared with theories held by A. A. Mendes Correâ and Paul Rivet. Like many another student, Mendes Correâ saw Australian, Caucasoid, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Asiatic affinities among the American Indians; but he struck into a new field of theory in 1926 by transporting the Australians to South America over a now-vanished land-bridge to the south. Using Wegener’s hypothesis of the drift of continents, he found his bridge in a severed and displaced Antarctica. He conceded that this was only a conjecture, but thought it “very probable.”[19] That same year Rivet—approving migrations of Australian, Malayan-Polynesian, Asiatic, and Ural elements—suggested that glaciation in the southern hemisphere might have aided the Australians in passing from island to island until they reached the mainland of South America.[20] He dated their journey at only 6,000 years ago,[21] so that glacial assistance beyond the present extent of Antarctica seems just a little unlikely. Rivet, following many a student from Leibnitz to Thomas Jefferson, proposed to trace the origin of the American peoples through comparing their languages with those of the Old World. In 1925 he came up with something more than the usual random identities between words.[22] Indeed, the parallels which he drew between the present speech of the Tshon of Patagonia and the Australians seemed to Dixon to be impossibly close after centuries upon centuries of separation from one another and of contact with other peoples.[23] Only sheer coincidence could account for such identity.
There remain two champions of multiform and multitudinous migrations—José Imbelloni of Argentina and Harold S. Gladwin. They go further than any of their predecessors in peopling the New World with varied races, and further in advancing transpacific migrations as an important factor in the history of the Americas.