A GREAT-CIRCLE ROUTE TO NORTH AMERICA
On the flat, distorted map of Mercator, on page 4, the path of early man across Asia to the New World seems a roundabout curve. On a globe, it is very nearly a great circle. This is indicated on a map such as this, projected from a point above the North Pole. From above Bering Strait, the route would appear still straighter.
Aleš Hrdlička has said that not many men would have frequented northeastern Siberia because of its inhospitable climate, and so only a few would have “trickled over.”[8] The opposite seems to have been true in the time of the glaciers. Then northeastern Asia was an excellent jumping-off place for the Old World migrant. In the first place, there was not much glaciation in this area, certainly nothing to interfere with the passage of people along the coast. The last glaciation was “far less extensive than its predecessor,” say R. F. Flint and H. G. Dorsey, “and was confined to the higher parts of the higher mountain ranges.”[9] Secondly, the land-bridge, which made crossing easy, also altered the climate of Siberia south of the bridge.[10] It cut off the arctic currents and therefore to some extent the arctic damp which now makes the Asiatic coast inhospitable. Hrdlička—one of the first and most violent opponents of early man in America—said that the land-bridge was not essential. Even if it had existed, “man would not have used it, but would have followed the much easier route over the water.”[11]
Three Roads to the South—with One Detour
Once in Alaska, man—early or not so early—had a number of routes to choose from. If he was of maritime habits, and crossed by water, he would have tended to stick to his boats, and sail or paddle southward and southeastward down the coast and on through the inland passages of lower Alaska and Canada which protect boats from ocean storms. When Frank C. Hibben found a certain early kind of spear point in a curio shop in Ketchikan, Alaska, and on the far-away shore of Cook Inlet, he called attention to a route—whether overland or by sea—which hardly anyone had stressed except Hrdlička.[12] Hrdlička stressed it because he brought man over after the glaciers and in boats. But even in the Great Ice Age this route was not impossible for men without boats. Migrants who had crossed by a land-bridge might have turned south along the Pacific shore, climbing and crossing the ice barriers of the glacial rivers that still slide slowly down from the inland mountains. Philip S. Smith points out that “ice surfaces allow fully as easy travel by sled and on foot as do the ordinary land surfaces.”[13] But was there game, as well as fish, along the coast to lure the migrant on and to sustain him upon the journey?
Other men seem to have chosen to tramp and hunt eastward and northeastward from the strait. In this direction there were two main routes open to men and game. One route led up the narrow lowlands of the northwest coast to the mouth of the Mackenzie River and then south up its long valley. The other, and much more likely path for early man, was up the ice-free Yukon and its tributaries. These would have taken him eastward to the Mackenzie or southward through the plateau between the northern Rockies and the Coastal Range. Hrdlička thought the Yukon valley a most unpromising route because of the turbulent rivers and the noxious insects; but most students disagree with him and stress the abundance of fish and game. There can be no question that some parts of this route were used by early man—and extinct mammals, too. His ancient spear points have been found in the muck beds of Fairbanks mingled with the fossilized bones of elephant, bison, camel, horse, and an extinct jaguar once called the Alaskan lion.[14] Other early points have been discovered in western Canada in the area of the mountain plateau. In 1944 Frederick Johnson located fifteen camp sites in early soil levels along the route of the plateau corridor and found many varieties of artifacts. Among these were a few points, most of them fragmentary, the butts of which resembled those of an early type.[15] Following Johnson in 1945, Douglas Leechman found other sites and artifacts along this route in soils formed perhaps 9,000 years ago.[16]
The Yukon valley rivers could have taken early man to the Mackenzie and to the northern edge of the plateau; but during a large part of the Great Ice Age he still faced the gigantic fields of snow and ice that covered half of North America. Although ice journeys may not be so very difficult, and early man had learned to live in the chill of northern Siberia (the Eskimo of today proves that human existence is possible in a land of little sun and much cold), we cannot believe that he attempted to cross the icy wastes. A journey on foot across a thousand or two thousand miles of ice becomes a sheer impossibility if there is no provender to be found along the way. There was certainly no food for musk ox or mammoth, and therefore no food for man. Without game to hunt, he would not have felt the impulse to invade the ice fields.
MIGRATION ROUTES
The pathways available to early man, as mapped by Carl Sauer—to which have been added a problematical route by sea along the southern coast of Alaska and another down the corridor between the eastern Rockies in Canada and the coastal range. (After Sauer, 1944.)