Fig. 36. Diagrammatic representation by Spinden of the development of native American culture. Fewer elements of culture are included than in [figure 35], but these are definitely placed according to their indicated sequence in time. While this diagram was prepared with particular reference to Middle American civilization and therefore has reference only to the culture areas cut by the line ABCD, and while it carries the peopling of the continent a few thousand years back of the time assumed in this book, it is in substantial agreement with the views expressed in the present chapter.
At best, however, all diagrams are not only schematic but static; and it may accordingly be worth while to try to narrate some of the principal events of the history of American civilization in order to bring out their continuity and relations as they appear in perspective. But the reader must remember that this is a reconstruction from indirect and often imperfect evidence, probably correct in the large and in many details, certain to be incorrect in some proportion of its findings, tentative throughout and subject to revision as the future brings fuller insight. It aims to give the truth as it can be pieced together: it is never a directly documented story like those familiar to us from orthodox “history.”
177. Racial Origin of the American Indians
The American race can hardly have come from anywhere else than Asia: it entered the New World perhaps ten thousand years ago. Its affiliations, as previously set forth (§ [23], [25]) are generically Mongoloid. This statement does not mean that the American Indians are descended from the Chinese or Japanese, any more than the fact that these are denominated Mongolians implies belief in their descent from the particular modern people known as the Mongols. We call ourselves Caucasians without any intimation that our ancestors lived in the Caucasus mountains or that the present inhabitants of the Caucasus are a purer and more representative stock than we. So the Mongolians are that group of “yellow” peoples of eastern Asia of whom the Mongols form part; and the Mongoloids are the larger group that takes in Mongolians, East Indians, and Americans. From the original proto-Mongoloid stem, all three divisions and their subdivisions have sprung and differentiated. The American Indians have probably remained closer to it than the Chinese. It would be more correct to say that the Chinese have developed out of an ancient Indian-like stock, acquiring slant eyes rather late.
The proto-Mongoloid stem must be ten thousand years old. It is probably much older. In the Aurignacian period, the third from the last in the Old Stone Age, twenty-five thousand or so years ago, possibly longer, the two other great types of living men were already rather well characterized. The fossil Grimaldi race of this period shows pretty clear Negroid affinities; the contemporary Cro-Magnon race can probably be reckoned as proto-Caucasian. It is therefore probable, although as yet unproved by discoveries, that the proto-Mongoloids were also already in existence.
178. The Time of the Peopling of America
About the end of the Palæolithic or beginning of the Neolithic some of these proto-Mongoloids drifted from Asia into North America. These were probably the real discoverers of the New World, which they found inhabited only by brutes. The time of their invasion can be but roughly fixed, yet within its limits it seems fairly reliable. Had the migration occurred much later, when the Neolithic was already well under way, the domesticated animals and plants of the Old World would have been introduced—cattle, pigs, sheep, wheat, barley, rice, millet, all of which the Americans lacked. The same holds for inventions like the wheel.
Analogous arguments weigh against a belief in a possible earlier peopling of America, say in the middle Palæolithic. In that event there ought to be cave or rock shelter or river terrace deposits corresponding to those of Europe in containing only implements of Palæolithic type. But none such have been found in America, or where alleged, their circumstances have remained matters of controversy.
Further, if Palæolithic man had inhabited the western hemisphere, it is likely that his fossil remains would have come to light. There has been much excavation, and numerous investigators are alive to the importance which evidence of this sort would bear. Yet to date not a single human fossil of positively Pleistocene age or type has been discovered. Numerous sensational finds have been announced. But in every case their geological matrix or stratum has been proved either recent or open to doubt. And not a single fragment of a skeleton of Neandertal type, or one equally different from modern man, is on record from America. Every once alleged Pleistocene skull or part appears to belong to some branch of the American Indian race as it exists to-day. It is therefore unlikely that man reached America before the last stage of the Palæolithic.