Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques
Somehow or other, by this route or that, the migrants from Asia drifted across to the Americas, down the two continents, and out to their uttermost limits. Of the many possible tests of man’s age in the New World—some good, some not so good—one of the least accurate is a guess at how long it would take men and women, encumbered with children, to walk—and to eat their way—from Bering Strait to Cape Horn. It has been estimated that they might have covered the 4,000 miles from Harbin, Manchuria, to Vancouver Island in from 20 to 1,000 years; the time involved really depends on how fast and in what direction those wild animals moved upon which early man depended for food. As the country widened out, then narrowed in Central America, and widened out once more, there is no knowing how long the trip to Cape Horn may have taken. Our migrants would have had to camp and hunt as they went, and at first they would have moved only as the pursuit of game spurred them on. There would have had to be time, too, for increase in numbers—among themselves as well as among later invaders—to create pressure of population, and force the earlier men to the peripheries of northeastern America, Florida, and Lower California, and push them across jungled Panama and Amazonia and toward the bleaker and less desirable parts of South America. The various invaders multiplied as they moved, and it is anybody’s guess how many people were crowded into America by 1492; one authority says 8,400,000, another 50,000,000 to 75,000,000.[1] It took much time, of course—many millenniums—to breed so many men and cover so wide a space.
THE TREKS OF EARLY MAN
This map shows how far man would have had to walk from southern Africa to a spot just east of the Caspian Sea, where it used to be supposed that man originated, and it also shows the distance from that area to England, Australia, and Tierra del Fuego. The journey of early man from Bering Strait to the tip of Cape Horn was a matter of 10,000 miles.
Other things suggest a long sojourn for the Indian in the New World. Consider the matter of language—“the archives of history.” The Indian, writes N. C. Nelson, “had been at home in the New World long enough to have evolved about 160 linguistic stocks or language families, with 1,200 or more dialectic subdivisions.”[2] Alfred L. Kroeber says that North and South America “contain more native language families than all the remainder of the world.”[3] Some of this diversity could be due to migrations from different linguistic areas of the Old World. It might also be accounted for by the theory of Franz Boas that among early primitive peoples there was great diversity of language, and that single tongues began to spread widely only when conquering and proselyting groups won a certain amount of power and dominion.[4] John Harrington, an American linguistic authority, believes that the diversity of Indian speech argues a very long residence in the New World—“at least 20,000 years, perhaps three times that.”[5] Edgar B. Howard states: “Considering that the languages of the New World lack evidence, outside of Eskimo, of any identification with Old World languages, the conclusion appears to be that human contact between the two continents was very remote.”[6] If there is no such identification, then even the last migrants came at a very early date indeed, or else all the tribal relatives who were left behind in the Old World perished without linguistic trace. It is possible, of course, that resemblances have merely not been recognized.
In addition to differentiation of language, there is differentiation of physique. When we in the United States think of the Indian, we think of a tall man with high cheekbones, a hawk-nose, and a bronze-red skin. Actually the American Indian is probably more varied in height, face, and color than the whole White racial stock.[7] More than that, his somatic constitution—the inner man in a physical sense—varies greatly. By 1492 the Indian had adapted himself to eight different climates from arctic to tropic, from arid to humid, from sea level to the 14,000-foot heights of Peru. This would take time, much time. Albrecht Penck, the great European glacialist, thinks 25,000 years hardly long enough.[8]
The civilizations which the Indian developed in the Americas—the Maya, Aztec, and Inca cultures—provide another test of how long man had been in the New World before Columbus came. This test is no more exact than those we have already mentioned, but it suggests quite a long sojourn.