DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS INDICATED BY PRESENT DATA
The maze of thoughts on the origin of the Eskimo shows one fact conclusively, which is that the necessary evidence on the subject has hitherto been insufficient. From whatever side the problem has been approached, whether linguistically, culturally, from the study of myths, or even somatologically, the materials were, it is plain, more or less inadequate and there was not enough for satisfactory comparisons. The best contributions to Eskimo studies, from the oldest to the most recent, all accentuate the need for further research, and more ample collections.
Another point is that heterogeneous and wide apart as many of the opinions may seem, yet when the subject is looked upon with a larger perspective they may often perhaps be harmonized. Thus a belief in an American origin of the Eskimo need not exclude that in the Asiatic derivation of his parental stock. Even in the case of the supposed European derivation the Eskimo are understood to have reached America through Asia; there is not one suggestion of any importance advocating the coming of the Eskimo over northwestern Europe and Iceland. Only the Meigs-Grote-Nordenskiöld theory of an ancient polar race and its descent southward appears now as beyond the bounds of what would be at least partly justifiable.
What is the contribution to the subject of the studies reported in this treatise, with its relatively great amount of somatological material? The answer is not easy.
Even the truly great and precious material at hand is not sufficient. There are important parts of the Arctic, such as the Hudson Bay region, Baffin Land, and the central region; several parts of the west coast, such as the inland waters of the Seward Peninsula and the Eskimo portions of the Selawik, Kobuk, Noatak, and Yukon Rivers; and above all the Eskimo part of northeastern Siberia, from which there are insufficient or no collections. There is, moreover, especially in this country, a great want of skeletal material from the non-Eskimo Siberian tribes, and also from the old European peoples that are of most importance for comparisons. It must be plain, therefore, that even at present no final deductions are possible. All that can be claimed for the evidence here brought forth is that it clears, or tends to settle, certain secondary problems, and that it presents indications of value for the rest of the question.
The secondary problems that may herewith be regarded as settled are as follows:
1. Unity or plurality of the race.—The materials at hand give no substantiation to the possibility of the Eskimo belonging to more than one basic strain of people. They range in color from tan or light reddish-yellow to medium brown; in stature from decidedly short to above the general human medium; in head from brachycephalic and low to extremely dolichocephalic, high and keel shaped; in eyes from horizontal to decidedly mongoloid; in orbits from microseme to hypermegaseme; in nose from fully mesorrhinic to extremely leptorrhinic; in physiognomy from pure "Indian" to extreme "Eskimo." Yet all through there runs, both in the living and in the skeletal remains, so much of a basic identity that no separation into any distinct original "races" is possible. At most it is permissible to speak of a few prevalent types.
2. Relation.—The general basic prototype of the Eskimo, according to all evidence, is so closely akin to that of the Indian that the two can not be fully separated. They appear only as the thumb and the digits of the same hand, some large old mother stock from which both gradually differentiated. This appears to be an unavoidable conclusion from the present anthropological knowledge of the two peoples.
The next unavoidable deduction is that the mother stock of both the Eskimo and the Indian can only be identified with the great yellow-brown stem of man, the home of which was in Asia, but the roots of which, as has been discussed elsewhere, were probably in ancient (later paleolithic) Europe.[283] The latter fact may explain the cultural as well as somatological resemblances between the Eskimo, as well as the Indian (for the Indian, physically at least, has much in common with the upper Aurignacians), and the upper glacial European populations. But such an explanation can not in the light of present knowledge legitimately be extended to the assumption that either the Indian complex or the Eskimo originated as such in Europe; they could be at most but parts of the eventual more or less further differentiated Asiatic progeny of the upper paleolithic Europeans.