Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

The next instrument of ethnological criticism is to be found in the phænomena themselves of the dispersion and distribution of our species.

First as to its universality. In this respect we must look minutely before we shall find places where Man is not. These, if we find them at all, will come under one of two conditions; the climate will be extreme, or the isolation excessive. For instances of the first we take the Poles; and, as far as the Antarctic Circle is concerned, we find no inhabitants in the ice-bound regions—few and far between—of its neighbourhood; none south of 55° S. lat., or the extremity of the Tierra del Fuego. This, however, is peopled. We must remember, however, that in the Southern Ocean such regions as New South Shetland and Victoria Land are isolated as well as cold and frozen.

The North Pole, however, must be approached within 25° before we lose sight of Man, or find him excluded from even a permanent habitation. Spitzbergen is beyond the limits of human occupancy. Nova Zembla, when first discovered, was also uninhabited. So was Iceland. Here, however, it was the isolation of the island that made it so. A hardy stock of men, nearly related to ourselves, have occupied it since the ninth century; and continental Greenland is peopled as far as the 75th degree—though, perhaps, only as a summer residence.

Far to the east of Nova Zembla and opposite to the country of the Yukahiri—a hardy people on the rivers Kolyma and Indijirka, and within the Arctic Circle—lies the island of New Siberia. I find from Wrangell’s Travels in Siberia that certain expatriated Yukahiri are believed to have fled thither. Have they lived or died? Have they reached the island? In case they have done so, and kept body and soul together, New Siberia is probably the most northern spot of the inhabited world.

How cold a country must be in order to remain empty of men, we have seen. Such localities are but few. None are too hot—unless, indeed, we believe the centre of Equatorial Africa to be a solitude.

In South America there is a great blank in the Maps. For many degrees on each side of the Upper Amazons lies a vast tract—said to be a jungle—and marked Sirionos, the name of a frontier population. Yet the Sirionos are not, for one moment, supposed to fill up the vast hiatus. At the same time, there are few, or none, besides. Is this tract a drear unhumanized waste? It is said to be so—to be wet, woody, and oppressively malarious. Yet, this merely means that there is a forest and a swamp of a certain magnitude, and of a certain degree of impenetrability.

Other such areas are unexplored—yet we presume them to be occupied; though ever so thinly: e. g. the interiors of New Guinea and Australia.

That Greenland was known to the early Icelanders is well known. And that it was occupied when so first known is also certain. One of the geographical localities mentioned in an old Saga has an Eskimo word for one of its elements—Utibuks-firth = the firth of the isthmus; Utibuk in Eskimo meaning isthmus.

Of the islands originally uninhabited those which are, at one and the same time, large and near continents are Madeira and Iceland—the former being a lonely wood. The Canaries, though smaller and more isolated, have been occupied by the remarkable family of the Guanches. Add to these, Ascension, St. Helena, the Galapagos, Kerguelen’s Island, and a few others.