Early Man in the New World

by Kenneth Macgowan; Joseph A. Hester

The Mythical Indian Race

Science has found a great many artifacts and a few skulls that seem to have belonged to early man. Was he an Indian? Was he a Paleo-Indian—whatever that may imply? Was he a Mongoloid with an admixture of Australoid, Negroid, and White? Was he Mongoloid at all?

Among the most blatant misnomers of popular science is “Indian race.” Even in North America it is an absurdity. Throw in Middle America and South America, and the attempt to fit the people of the New World into this or any one racial pigeonhole becomes laughable. Living Indians of “pure” breed show an immense variety in all physical features except their eyes, their hair, their cheekbones, and their upper front teeth. Some of their skulls and some of the skulls of their dead—particularly those that belonged to early man—show marked differences from those of the Mongoloid race of which the Indians are all commonly supposed to be a part. The differences are so marked that some of our physical anthropologists believe that other races than the Mongoloid contributed to the discovery and settlement of the Americas. They see at least one and possibly three such contributions. If we discount transpacific migration, we must accept the fact that all the peoples of northern Asia did not always belong to the now ubiquitous Mongoloid races. Of this, more at the end of the chapter.

The Mongoloid racial stock has five physical traits that occur with high frequency, which means that in any mixture with another race, five traits seem likely to be transmitted to immediate descendants. One trait is the peculiar shovel shape of the upper incisor, or front, teeth. The second is brown eyes. The third is straight black hair. The fourth is prominent cheekbones, or malars. A fifth is the so-called Mongoloid spot, a purplish discoloration appearing at the base of the spine shortly after birth. It persists for a few years, gradually becoming indistinct before adolescence. Of course, there are minor irregularities. Not all the millions of incisors of our Indians are shovel-shaped. The wavy hair of the Lacandon Indians of southern Mexico may have a reddish tinge. But the great majority of New World Indians share these traits, including prominent cheekbones, and, by so much, they share also a very considerable amount of Mongoloid ancestry.

The eye of a Chinese with the Mongoloid fold, contrasted with the eye of a white man. (After Hooton, 1931.)

In addition, there are many traits typical of Asiatic Mongoloids which appear very irregularly in the Americas. The “Mongoloid fold”—an overhanging fold of skin on the upper eyelid—is found in some tribes and not in others, and in certain individuals of a tribe and not in others. The bony structure of the face varies greatly. Some tribes have strong chins; some, weak ones. The nose of the typical Plains Indian is hawklike—a violent departure from the Mongoloid’s rather flat nasal equipment. The “Semitic” nose of the Maya is Japanese but not at all Chinese. “The Indian type,” says Nelson, “is distinguishable in one way or another from its nearest Mongoloid relations, and at the same time is separable according to some authorities into about ten more or less distinct varieties.”[1]

Looked at in terms of resemblances to Old World peoples, the American Indian becomes a very crazy quilt of races. Hooton sees “an almost pre-Dravidian look” about the Lacandons which vaguely reminds him of the Veddas of India. He finds that many Indians of the Northwest coast resemble Alpine Europeans, and that eastern Indians have a “European look,” and are “by no means as Mongoloid as the Plains and Southwestern Indians”:

For years I have been troubled by the types depicted in the splendid series of oil portraits of Indians in the Peabody Museum. The most of these represent Indians of the eastern and southeastern United States, and, although the portraits are the work of an excellent painter, his subjects look very European. The features of most are very un-Mongoloid, with prominent noses and oval faces ... some Plains Indians are included in the series, and these seem to be accurate representations of types familiar today. I am, therefore, disposed to think that the European-like types are not the result of an artistic convention, but actually did exist.[2]