Such evidence as this it is that yields the period indicated—the closing stages of the Palæolithic or earliest Neolithic—as the time of man’s entry into America. The ten thousand years set as the lapse since this event are admittedly more arbitrary. No one pretends to date the remoter stages of European prehistory exactly. Relative durations are all that it is legitimate to pin much faith on. Dates are avowedly approximations. The estimate here chosen for the end of the Paleolithic is 8000 B.C.—ten thousand years ago. This round number, not taken too literally, has the virtue of concreteness and seems somewhere near the truth. It may yet prove to be a few thousand years short or over. But it does allow enough time, and no obtrusive excess of time, for the diversification of the Indians in race, speech, and culture; and this seeming accord of the assumption with the present facts may be taken as a rough corroboration.
The other culture elements assigned in [Figure 35] to the first or immigrant stratum cannot be dated by any concrete remains, since some are institutions and others are arts whose materials are perishable—baskets and fire-drills, for instance. They are, however, found among all or most of the lower American tribes, and recur more or less widely in the eastern hemisphere.
The first settlers may accordingly be pictured as a people living off nature; hunting, fishing, gathering roots and fruits and seeds, digging or picking shellfish. Their best weapons were the bow and the harpoon with detachable head. The latter may already have been propelled by the atlatl or spear-thrower, an artificial extension of the arm. Simpler weapons were also used: clubs, stones, probably darts and spears, perhaps daggers of bone or stone. Flint was chipped and flaked, other stones were beginning to be ground or rubbed into form. Bone awls served for piercing; less certainly, eyed needles for sewing. Cordage of bast was twisted, and in all likelihood baskets, bins, weirs, traps were woven or twined, perhaps also nets made. Dogs were alternately played with and kicked about; they were half kept, half tolerated, probably eaten in time of need. There was no organization of society but on a basis of blood and contiguity. Related groups would act together until they fell apart. Labor was sex allotted; the men of each community possibly maintained a house or place of meeting at which they gathered in their leisure, perhaps nightly, and which women feared to enter. Beliefs in souls and spirits were already immemorially old. The people had risen to the point of being no longer passive toward the immaterial; the most intense-minded among them aspired to communication with the spirits; they demonstrated to their fellows their control and utilization of supernatural beings, and were what we call shamans. Custom in fact conceded the influence of the spiritual world on every human being, and felt it to be strongest at times of passage or crisis—birth, maturity, death. Puberty in particular seemed important, as portentous of the whole of adult life. The welfare of the individual and his proper relation to the community were therefore sought to be insured by spiritual safe-guarding. Girls were secluded, treated or doctored, trained; boys subjected to whipping or other ordeals of fortitude; the passing of such initiation admitted them to the men’s house.
181. The Route of Entry into the Western Hemisphere
With such background man entered America at Behring Strait. He may have navigated; more likely, or more often, he crossed on the ice. The water distance is only about sixty miles; the Diomede islands lie near the middle of the gap; and the ice may have extended across pretty continuously, ten thousand years nearer the peak of the last glaciation. Long before, there had been a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, by which horses, camels, cattle, elephants, deer and many other species extended their range from one continent to another. But this was in geological antiquity, man’s entry in geological recency—immediacy, rather; and the divided configuration of the continents was probably already established. Horses had become extinct in the New World when man arrived, the elephant tribe probably also. Llamas, pumas, jaguars took the place of Old World camels, lions, tigers. The fauna of the Americas, their vegetation, their climate, were nearly as they are to-day.
The Aleutian islands have also been suggested as a migration route. But their chain is long, the gap at the western end one of hundreds of miles of open water, scarcely negotiable except to rather expert navigators. Still weaker would be any supposition of arrival from Polynesia. Here the distances between the nearest islands and the mainland run to thousands of miles. Only well-equipped voyagers could survive, and there is nothing to prove positively that even late Palæolithic man had boats. Further, all the Polynesian evidence points to a late settling of the eastern islands of the Pacific; a few thousand years ago at most. Exclusion therefore indicates the Behring route as the only one to be seriously considered.
The migration was scarcely a sudden or single one. It went on for generations, perhaps for thousands of years in driblets. Two or three explorers would set across and return, to be followed by a few families. Others succeeded them. There would be no crowding, for a long time no resistance at the strait on the part of jealous established settlers. The open south, always milder, generally more fruitful the farther one went, lay ahead. It must long have drawn immigrants away from the strait faster than they crossed it. Some of the invading bands almost certainly differed from one another in customs, perhaps perceptibly in appearance, though of one general level of culture.
182. The Spread Over Two Continents
Before them lay fifteen million miles of tundra, forest, plains, sea coast, desert, savannah, jungle, and plateaux, rich in this or that food, with no occupant to dispute possession or block travel but bear, wolf, puma, and jaguar—timid beasts compared with those of the Old World. So the immigrants pushed across the breadth of the continent and down its length, entered the tropics in Mexico, defiled through Panama—and a second continent stretched before them. How long it took the first wanderers to diffuse themselves from Alaska to the Strait of Magellan, it is impossible to say. Perhaps a couple of thousand years, perhaps only a few hundred. Curiosity, the desire to see, are strong in men if fear imposes no restraints.
Sooner or later, at any rate, they were living throughout both continents. The advance guard had long lost knowledge of the rear, if indeed the rear did not arrive until after the advance could progress no farther. When the Caucasian discovered America he might have commenced at Cape Horn, gone on to a people whose very existence was unknown to those at his starting point, and repeated the step a dozen times until his journey brought him to the Arctic. Before the rise of the empires of Mexico and Peru the number of links in the chain ignorant of each other would have been greater. The moving bands of the primitive first-comers no doubt lost touch with each other quickly in even shorter stretches. Thus diversities of speech, of mode of life, would become established. A family of brothers might become dominant in a band through the number of their descendants and so color the somatic type of the group, which in turn, favored by fortune and expanding, might lay the hereditary foundation for a sub-racial variety.