Pacific affinities of North American Indians.
The broken bridge across Bering Strait formed by East Cape, Cape Prince of Wales and the Diomede Islands between, and further south the natural causeway of the Commander and Aleutian Islands leading from the peninsula of Kamchatka to that of Unalaska, have facilitated intercourse between Asia and America.[761] Justin Winsor says, "There is hardly a stronger demonstration of such connection between the two continents than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper latitudes."[762] This resemblance is by no means confined to the Eskimo and Chukches, who have exchanged colonists across Bering Sea. Recent investigations have revealed a wider kinship. The population of northern Siberia speaks in general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct class called "paleasiatics" or "hyperboreans." This class is composed of the Ostyak and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme northeastern Siberia. As far back as 1850, the eminent philologist Robert Latham noted a marked linguistic agreement, both in structure and verbal affinity, between our Northwest Coast tribes and the peoples of the islands and peninsulas fringing northeastern Asia. "Koriak is notably American," he said.[763] The recent Jesup Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America and the nearby coast of Asia investigated the Koryak, to determine whether in the past there had been any connection between the cultures and ethnic types of the Old and New World. These investigations have proved beyond doubt a kinship of culture, attributable either to a remote common origin or to former contact, long and close, between these isolated Siberian tribes and the American aborigines. They show that the Koryak are one of the Asiatic tribes standing nearest to the northwestern American Indian.[764] [See map page 103.]
Polynesian affinities.
W.H. Dall finds the inhabitants of the Pacific slope of North America conspicuously allied with Oceanica in cultural achievements, whose origin he therefore assigns to that vast congeries of islands stretching from Asia toward South America in latitude 25° south. These islands, closely clustered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with widening spaces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the Peruvian coast. It is to be noted that these islands lie just outside the westward-bearing Equatorial Current and trade-winds, on the margin of the South Pacific anti-cyclonic winds and a southern current which sets towards the Peruvian coast.[765] A more probable avenue for the introduction of these Polynesian or Malayan elements of culture is found in O.T. Mason's theory, that primitive mariners of the southwestern Pacific, led into migration by the eternal food quest, may have skirted the seaboard of East Asia and Northwest America, passing along a great-circle route through the succession of marginal seas and archipelagoes to various ports of entry on the Pacific front of America. Such a route, favored by the prevailing marine currents and winds from the southwest, and used repeatedly during long periods of time, might have introduced trans-Pacific elements of race and culture into the western side of America.[766]
The real Orient of the World.
Moreover, primitive America resembled Oceanica and northern Asia in its ignorance of iron, in its Stone Age civilization, and its retarded social and political development. Such affinities as it shows were predominantly Pacific or trans-Pacific.[767] On its Atlantic side, it stood out in striking contrast to the contemporaneous civilizations and races in Europe and Africa; this was its unneighbored shore, lying on the eastern margin of that broad zone of habitation which stretched hence westward on and on around the world, to the outermost capes of Europe and Africa. The Atlantic abyss formed the single gap in this encircling belt of population, to which Columbus at last affixed the clasp. The Atlantic face of the Americas formed therefore the drowsy unstirred Orient of the inhabited world, which westward developed growing activity—dreaming a civilization in Mexico and Peru, roused to artistic and maritime achievement in Oceanica and the Malay Archipelago, to permanent state-making and real cultural development in Asia, and attaining the highest civilization at last in western Europe. There was the sunset margin of the inhabited world, the area of achievement, the adult Occident, facing across the dividing ocean that infant Orient beyond. Here the Old World, the full-grown world, had accumulated in Columbus' time the matured forces of a hemisphere; it was searching for some outlet across the shoreless distances of the Atlantic, waiting for some call from its voiceless beyond.