Page:The American Indian.djvu/385

Rh it is not at all improbable that future research in Asia will give grounds for assuming the Crô-Magnon and contemporaneous New World peoples to be collateral branches from a central Asiatic type. More than once, attention has been called to certain vague similarities between certain Paleolithic races and the Eskimo, and in the New World certain older skulls from the remoter parts of South America are not far removed from this same Eskimo type. Incidentally, we may note that the Chancelade skeleton in western Europe belonging to Magdalenian time, is quite similar to the modern Eskimo. The earlier races appearing in Europe tend to be long-headed, and we have noted a less marked, but still noticeable tendency for the long heads in the New World to cluster on the extreme margins. That this is rather fundamental appears when we regard mammals as a whole, for we read that "when the parallel series in Europe and North America are sufficiently complete, they are seen to be not parallel phyla of independent local evolution, but periodically recruited by more progressive new stages, apparently from a common center of dispersal. The relations are like those of one side and the other of a branching tree whose trunk region is unknown to us." The human phenomena we have been considering appear, therefore, as but an integral part of mammalian expansion, and, for that reason, become more evident.

In conclusion, then, we seem to have a large mass of hominidæ occupying the greater part of Asia and America, the tendency of which was toward round-headedness and straight hair; hanging on the outskirts of these were many variants. This interpretation is not antagonistic to those who regard the modern Indo-European as distinct from the Asiatic-American branch, for the suggestive parallels between earlier types of western Europe and America arise in a much earlier period of man's history. That the New World native is a direct descendant of the Asiatic Mongolian is not to be inferred, for the differentiation is evidently remote; what is implied, is that somewhere in the distant past the Asiatic wing of the generalized type diverged into strains, one of which we now know as Mongolian, and another as American.