The meaning of this fact seems to me to be of importance. The evidence suggests, aside from other things, that American cultural developments may after all not have been purely local or even American, but that they may, in part at least, have been initiated or carried from Asia. In view of these and other recent developments it seems rational to consider that America may have been peopled by far eastern Asiatic groups that not merely carried with them differences in language and physique but also in some cases relatively high cultural developments. But these for the present are mere hypotheses.
There is no definite indication as yet that the people of the high fossil ivory art in the northern Bering Sea and neighboring parts were any others than the ancestors of the Eskimo. The skeletal remains from these regions, as will be shown later, rather support this view. But those ancestors may not yet have represented the characteristic present type of the people. Here, too, nothing definite can be said before the results of sufficient scientific excavations become available.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] MacCurdy described the first specimen of this kind in 1921 as "An Example of Eskimo Art," in Amer. Anthrop., vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 384-385. See also Collins (H. B., jr.), Prehistoric Art of the Alaskan Eskimo, Smith. Misc. Coll., vol. 81, No. 14, 52 pp., Washington, 1929.
[58] Quatrefages, A. de., Hommes fossiles et hommes sauvages. Paris, 1884.
[59] Mortillet, G. de., Le préhistorique origine et antiquité de l'homme. Paris, 1900, 206-207.
Sites and Villages
The location of the western Eskimo villages has received more or less attention by most of the explorers in their region from the Russian time onward; but such efforts are generally limited to the living villages in the area visited by the observers.
Perhaps the earliest Russian map of value in this connection on the Bering Sea region is that which I find in Billings and Gall's Voyage or "Putěshestvie" of 1791, printed in St. Petersburg 1811. The map bears no date, but is evidently quite early. It gives three villages on the western point and north coast of the Seward Peninsula, namely Kiemile (later Nykhta, now Wales), Chegliukh, and Tykiak. (Pl. 29.)