If the date of the entry is set at ten thousand years ago, the elapsed period accounts very well for the present diversification of the American race. There are broad and narrow headed tribes, tall and short ones, some with hooked noses, others with slightly wavy hair. But the fundamental type is everywhere the same. The differences seem just such as environment and mode of life, the accidents of descent from small groups, and perhaps a slight effect of selection, would be certain to accomplish in time. In general, the natives of America are remarkably homogeneous, considering the vast territory they occupy, its variations of temperature, humidity, altitude, and food supply, and the marked differences in the living customs of many tribes. The one group that at all stand apart are the Eskimo; and these are distinct in language and culture also. Moreover, they occupy the parts nearest to Asia, including both sides of Behring Strait. Thus they seem to represent a separate origin. But all the other groups from Alaska to Patagonia are so closely related somatically, that no comprehensive and generally accepted sub-classification of them has yet been possible. In fact, the American race seems almost too undifferentiated to require ten thousand years for its superficial diversifications; until it is remembered that human races left to themselves seem in most cases to alter rather slowly. Mixture is one of the greatest factors of racial change, and in the isolation of America this element was eliminated to a much larger extent than in most of the Old World.
179. Linguistic Diversification
Language tells a similar story. The American Indian languages certainly appear to be diverse. It has been customary to reckon about a hundred and fifty distinct speech families in North and South America (§ [50]). But many of these are imperfectly known; of late several Americanist philologists have been inclined to see definite resemblances between numerous tongues that are superficially different. Buried and disguised resemblances are being noted, which point to original unity. Thus the number of genetically distinct families or language stocks is shrinking. The number to be ultimately recognized bids fair to be small.
Old World conditions are at bottom more similar than at first glance seems. English and the modern Hindu languages, such as Bengali, although certainly related, are quite different from each other. The proof of their common Indo-European origin rests largely on the similarities between their ancestral forms, Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. These in turn are tied together more closely by the connecting evidence of other ancient languages, such as Greek and Latin. Take away these extinct tongues and the modern transitional ones, imagine English and Bengali to be the only representatives of Indo-European, and it is doubtful whether their common parentage could be wholly proved. The relationship would certainly not be readily recognizable; the most painstaking analysis would reveal so many words wholly peculiar to each language, and so many exceptions to every suggestion of regular sound equivalences, that conservative philologists would perhaps refuse to commit themselves on the problem of a single origin.
This imaginary situation parallels the actual one in American linguistics. Not a single ancient form of speech has been preserved. Many living ones are inadequately known. The fact that some enthusiast has compiled a grammar of Nahuatl or Quechua or Eskimo does not necessarily mean that he has dissected out its whole structure. A book devoted to a language may be as superficial as it looks learned. And the man who really knew Nahuatl has usually concerned himself very little with Quechua. So far as he might become acquainted with it, it would appear so different that the pressing of comparisons would seem sterile. Thus the great diversity of American languages came to be accepted not because any one believed it to have been really established, but because until recently no critical scholar considered himself able to establish serious connections. It has been a case of unproved rather than disproved unity of origin.
If the Indo-European languages were not our own but those of a strange race and therefore known to us much less intensively; if the history of their ancient forms were obliterated instead of preserved for us for over three thousand years; and if they were allowed a period of ten thousand years in which to have differentiated, philology would probably be assigning them to several distinct stocks. Multiply by three the amount of difference which Bengali shows from Sanskrit, and by six that of English from Anglo-Saxon, and a degree of divergence might be attained roughly comparable to that between Nahuatl and Quechua, or Maya and Iroquois. This is not an assertion that Nahuatl and Quechua are related. It is a claim that in the light of present knowledge they might have been one language ten thousand years ago. A single people with a single speech could well have given rise in so long a period as that—three hundred generations—to languages that now seem so different.
And at that, there is no reason for believing that all the American languages are necessarily derivable from a single mother tongue. There might have been half-a-dozen or a dozen idioms in use among as many populations which moved out of Asia into Alaska. For of course it is improbable that the migration was an isolated, unitary event. More likely it filled a period of some length, during which a succession of waves of population lapped from one continent into the other. Each of these waves, which only the perspective of ages has merged into the appearance of a single movement, may have brought its own speech, from which in time there branched out languages that ultimately became so differentiated as to appear now like distinct families. Not that it is known that this happened; but it seems inherently plausible that it might have happened, and there is no present evidence to the contrary.
In short, philology interposes no obstacle to the acceptance of the date which has been assumed as roughly defining the period of the peopling of America.
180. The Primitive Culture of the Immigrants
As to the culture the immigrants brought with them, direct testimony being lacking, it is necessary to fall back on the working hypothesis that this culture was about the equivalent of the most backward American culture of to-day; or, better, of the common denominator of all American cultures, including the lowest. This procedure yields the group of elements entered in the bottommost layer of [Figure 35]. These elements were either brought along on the invasions or developed so soon afterwards as to become equally widely diffused. The harpoon, for instance, was used in Europe in the Magdalenian—at the close of the Palæolithic. For the bow and arrow, there is no proof in Europe until the opening of the Neolithic. The dog, the earliest animal attached to man, is known from the same period, whereas cattle, swine, and sheep were kept only at the height of the Neolithic (§ [67], [222]). As the American Indians possess dogs, it is difficult to attribute the custom otherwise than to a heritage from the same culture stage in the Old World to which the harpoon and bow belong. This connection is made more certain by the fact that the Indian dog is most closely related not to the specifically American coyote but to the circumpolar wolf and perhaps the jackal, and diverged into much the same types of breeds as the Old World dog. There are American races of dogs—some of them ancient, as represented by skeletons from mounds, and mummies from Arizona and Peru—that are respectively droop eared, curly tailed, short legged, long furred, hairless, or undershot in the jaw, thus corresponding closely to the breeds evolved with similar traits in the eastern hemisphere, and virtually forcing the conclusion that the dog was brought into America by man and not domesticated from a wild species in this continent.