Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America
The earliest recognition of non-Indian traits in the Americas came from scientists of the Old World—Mochi, Biasutti, Hansen, Quatrefages, ten Kate (who found the Pericú skulls in Lower California), Rivet, Gusinde, Lebzelter, Mendes Correâ, Hultkrantz. The first American and British students to accept the idea were Roland B. Dixon in 1923, A. C. Haddon in 1925, and Sir Arthur Keith and Earnest A. Hooton in 1930; the last two were physical anthropologists, and naturally knew more than archaeologists about the meaning of bones. Toward the end, even Hrdlička was diluting the Mongolism of the Indian with some Aurignacian and Magdalenian ancestry, though the Australoid and the Melanesian were too much for him.
In the English-speaking world the case for the Mongoloid Indian as the only type of early man was definitely and finally thrown out of court in 1930 by statements from two men eminent in their field—Keith and Hooton.
Keith’s statement was simple and short, but his position as a sound and skillful anatomist gave it considerable weight. He confirmed the judgment of Louis R. Sullivan and Milo Hellman that the Punin skull from Ecuador resembled the skulls of native women of Australia. The points of resemblance, he wrote, “were too numerous to permit us to suppose that the skull could be a sport produced by an American Indian parentage.” Here follows Keith’s decisive dictum: “This discovery at Punin does compel us to look into the possibility of a Pleistocene Glacial invasion of America by an Australoid people.”[4]