Occasionally burials were made or dead bodies were left in old houses. These remains, too, may prove of special value.
11. Observations on both the living and the skeletal remains in the western Eskimo area, supplemented by those on the northern and northeastern Eskimo, are now ample enough to justify certain generalizations. These are:
a. Barring the Aleuts, who are Indian, the Eskimo throughout belong somatologically to but one family, and this family appears as a remarkably pure racial unit, somewhat admixed in the south with the Aleut, on the western rivers with the Indian, and in the east and a few spots elsewhere with recent white people.
b. Within this family there is observable a considerable cranial change, with moderate differences in nasal breadth, stature, and color, but the general characteristics of the physiognomy, and of the body and the skeleton, remain remarkably similar.
c. The changes in the skull affect mainly the vault, which, in dimensions, ranges through all the intermediary grades from moderately broad, short, and moderately high to pronouncedly narrow, long, and high, and in form from moderately convex over the top to markedly keel shaped.
The distribution of skull form is somewhat irregular, but in general the broader and shorter heads predominate in the Asiatic and the southwestern and midwestern American portions of the Eskimo region, while the longest and narrowest heads are those of parts of the Seward Peninsula, and especially those from an isolated old settlement near Barrow with those of Greenland (exclusive of the Smith Sound), Baffin Land, and, judging from other data, also eastern Labrador. More or less transitional forms are found between the two extremes, without there being anywhere a clear line of demarcation.
The breadth of the nose, too, averages highest in the Asiatic, Bering Sea, and the more southern Eskimo of the Alaska coast, the least along the northern Arctic coast and in the northeast. The stature is highest along the western Alaska rivers and parts of the coast, least in Greenland and Labrador.
The skin, while differing within but moderate limits, is apparently lightest along parts (at least) of the northern Arctic.
12. The whole distribution of the physical characteristics among the Eskimo strongly suggests gradual changes—within the family itself; and as the long, narrow, high skull with keeled dome, occurring in a few limited localities in the west but principally in southern Greenland and neighboring territories, appears to be the farthest limit of the differentiation which finds no parallel in the neighboring or other peoples, while the form found in northeastern Asia, the Bering Sea, and southwestern Alaska is near to those of various surrounding peoples, the inevitable resulting deduction is that, in the light of our present knowledge, the origin of the Eskimo is to be looked for in the western rather than the northern Arctic or the northeastern area, and that particularly in the northern Bering Sea and the adjacent, particularly perhaps the northern, Asiatic region. The author is, therefore, led to regard the area between 160° west and 160° east longitude and 60° to 75° north latitude as containing the primal Eskimo-genic center, and as the source of the oldest Eskimo or proto-Eskimo extensions, while the larger part of the Eskimo differentiations is in all probability American.
13. The earlier notions relating to the western Eskimo, namely, those that would attribute his physical characteristics to a large admixture with the Indian, are now untenable for the following reasons: