Problematical Roads to the New World
Other routes from other lands may have brought other migrants. These routes are not so fanciful as the paths from Atlantis and Mu, but they have had few advocates. M. R. Harrington has mentioned the possibility that Magdalenian man of Glacial or Postglacial Europe may have crossed from Europe to Canada by way of Iceland and Greenland and various ice- and land-bridges to father the Eskimo.[18] Ellsworth Huntington adds to the land-bridge over Bering Strait “wind-bridges” across the middle Atlantic.[19] Like Father de Acosta, he believes that storms may have blown occasional vessels to the New World. To suggest that unwilling mariners from the Mediterranean may thus have made oneway trips, he cites from Stansbury Hagar[20] striking resemblances between the zodiacs of Europeans and of the Mayas, Aztecs, and even Peruvians. Whether this matter of the zodiacs is fact or fancy, Huntington’s unwilling voyagers could not have come much earlier than the birth of Christ. More fantastic were the claims voiced some years ago that the men who left skulls of Australoid or Melanesian type in the caves of South America reached that continent by a southern route across an Antarctic bridge of land and ice. Of much more serious importance is the possibility that the long-voyaging Polynesians, having negotiated the 5,000 or 6,000 miles that lay between their home on the edge of Asia and the Marquesas or Easter Island, would have tried occasionally to continue their eastward course. If they had done so, they could scarcely have missed South America. But this was in our own era, not in the time of early man.