AT the present day about six-sevenths of the population of the two Americas are composed of Whites and Half-breeds of all sorts. The remainder is made up almost equally of Negroes and natives, the latter improperly called Indians.[578] Notwithstanding the relatively small number of these last (about 10 millions), I shall deal almost exclusively with them in this chapter, as they are especially interesting from the ethnological point of view, besides having been the best studied from this point of view. A few words will suffice in regard to the Whites and Negroes. The white colonists and their uncrossed descendants belong for the most part to Anglo-Saxon or Germanic peoples in North America, and to Neo-Latin peoples in South America. Nine-tenths of the population of the United States owe their origin to the Anglo-Scotch, to the Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians, the fusion of which with other European types and with half-breeds tends to produce the Yankee type, which, if not a physical, is at least a social type. In Canada two-thirds of the white population are Anglophones, and the rest Francophones. In Mexico, in the Antilles, and in South America, nearly all the “white” population is made up of Neo-Latins—in Brazil descendants of the Portuguese, in Argentine of Italo-Spaniards, and elsewhere of Spaniards. The Latins have also contributed to form the half-breeds of America, of which several varieties exist. Half-breeds are especially numerous in Mexico and in the countries where the three elements, White, Indian, and Negro come together, as in the Antilles, in Columbia, Venezuela, and in Brazil. I shall give some particulars of the Half-breeds in connection with the populations of these lands (pp. [542] and [545]). As to the Negroes of America, they are the descendants of slaves imported, during more than three centuries, almost exclusively from the West African coast, and particularly from Guinea. (See p. [452].) The Negroes are especially numerous in the south of the United States and in the Antilles, as well as in the north and on the east coast of South America, as far as Buenos Ayres.[579]
Origin of the Americans.—To-day the existence of an American race, or rather a group of American races (p. [291]), is generally conceded, a group to which all the native populations of the New World belong; but as to the origins of these races unanimity of opinion is far from being reached. According to some authorities, the New World is a special centre of the manifestation of species, the Homo Americanus having developed on the spot; according to others, the ancestors of the present Indians came from neighbouring countries—a few from everywhere: from Siberia and China (by Behring’s Straits), from Polynesia (driven by currents), from Europe (failing Atlantis, by the table-land which in the quaternary period probably stretched between England and Greenland). Unfortunately, almost all these hypotheses are based on a confusion both of time and space. It may without difficulty be conceded that occasional Chinese and Japanese junks may have been driven towards America, although the existence of this continent remained unknown both to China and Japan till quite recent times. We know positively that the Northmen visited the shores of North America long before Christopher Columbus. And there is reason to suppose that the Polynesians, who are excellent navigators, may have ventured, urged forward by currents, as far as the South American coast. But all these occurrences would be too recent, and such migrations would be in fact both too insignificant and too isolated, to account for the peopling of a vast continent. The origins of American man are much more distant in the past, and the migrations, if migrations there were, must have taken place in the quaternary epoch, and probably as much from the coast of Europe as from the coast of Asia.
ANCIENT INHABITANTS OF AMERICA.
Just as is the case with Europe, it is not certain that man existed in America during the tertiary period,[580] but it is certain that he appeared there during the quaternary age. This period, in the New World as in the Old, had its glacial epochs. According to Dawson, Wright, and Chamberlin, there were two or three great movements of invasion and withdrawal of the American glaciers. It is not known if these movements were synchronous with those of Europe, but it is established that, as in Europe, the first invasion of glaciers was also the more widespread.[581]
Chipped argilite tools, similar to the quaternary quartz tools of sub-Pyrennean countries, have been found by Abbott in the gravels of the Delaware, near Trenton (New Jersey), side by side with quaternary animals (probably of the second glacial period, notably the fragment of a jaw-bone). Other implements have been gathered on the spot by Haynes in New Hampshire; by Dr. Metz in the gravels of Little Falls (Minnesota), regarded by W. Upham as more recent than those of Trenton; by Cresson at Medora (Indiana), and at Claymont (mouth of the Delaware), in a more ancient deposit than the Trenton one; by Wright and Volk at Trenton (in 1895); without reckoning the thousands of finds either on the surface or in lesser-known beds, which have been enumerated in a special memoir by Wilson. If I dwell on these details, it is because all these finds have latterly been vigorously attacked in the United States, since Holmes, who had studied the ancient quarries of the Indians, pointed out the great resemblances between the spoiled or waste argilite axes and arrowheads which he had found in these quarries, and the supposed palæolithic implements, particularly those of Trenton. Several authorities, such as Chamberlin, MacGee, Brinton, have, like Holmes himself, come to the conclusion that all the so-called palæolithic tools of America, and perhaps even those of Europe, are only spoiled or waste tools of the same kind, and relatively modern. This conclusion seems to overshoot the mark, seeing that specialists like Wilson, Boule, etc., are almost unable to distinguish undoubted quaternary tools of Europe from those of Trenton, and that the beds of many American prehistoric tools have been perfectly well ascertained not to have undergone any rehandling, and have been established as quaternary by competent geologists.[582]
Outside the United States palæolithic finds in the New World are not very numerous, and often are questionable.
Palæolithic tools of the Chellean and Mousterian type have been found in Mexico by Franco and Pinart;[583] other quaternary tools, together with a fragment of a human jaw-bone, have been described in the valley of Mexico by S. Herrera.[584]
In Brazil, on the shores of Lake Lagoa-do-Sumidoro (province of Minas Geraes), Lund exhumed human skeletons and flint objects, together with remains of animals which, if not quaternary, at least exist no longer in the country. Ameghino[585] also has collected in quaternary layers of the Pampas of the Argentine Republic remains of primitive human industries. I will only mention the numerous neolithic objects found almost everywhere in America. Among these objects it is necessary to give special attention to the “grooved axes” which are entirely characteristic of the New World (Wilson).
As to prehistoric human bones, investigation reduces them to little. I have already said that the tertiary or quaternary skull of Calaveras (brachycephalic) is classed as doubtful. The skeleton of Pontimelo (with dolichocephalic skull), found by Roth under the carapace of the glyptodon, an enormous armadillo of the Pampas regions of the Rio Arrecifes, a tributary of Rio de la Plata, also inspires but a limited confidence in many authorities. Lastly, the skulls and bones of Lagoa Santa, if not quaternary, at least very ancient, afford special characters (dolichocephaly, short stature, third trochanter), on the strength of which De Quatrefages has established a special race,[586] whose probable descendants constitute my Palæ-American sub-race. (See p. [292].)
Side by side with finds of stone objects and bones in very ancient strata, it is necessary to note also the shell-heaps and kitchen-middens scattered along all the coast of both Americas, from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Louisiana to Brazil, to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. In this last country the present inhabitants, who subsist especially on molluscs, contribute to the piling up of these heaps or to the formation of new ones. This is enough to indicate that all the kitchen-middens are not synchronous; and if there be some which go far back into antiquity, on the other hand there are some which are quite modern. The “Sambaquis,” for instance, of the mouth of the Amazon and of the province of Parana must be very ancient; some of the skulls which have been found in them recall the Palæ-American or Lagoa Santa race.[587] The paraderos, or elongated hillock graves, discovered in the province of Entre Rios, in the valley of the Rio Negro (Argentine Republic), by Moreno and R. Lista, enclose flint tools (neolithic?) and numerous skulls, among which a certain number also exhibit likenesses to those of Lagoa Santa.[588]