The First Americans, An Unsettled Continent

“ The only remaining theory, and probably the most important of all, because of its purely scientific character, which presents itself for our consideration, is that which not only considers the civilization of ancient America to have been indigenous, but also claims the inhabitants themselves to have been autochthonic; in a word, that by process of evolution or in some other way, the first Americans were either developed from a lower order in the animal kingdom or were created on the soil of this continent. ”

“ Man did not evolve on this continent; therefore he must have come to this hemisphere from the Old World where he had existed for many thousands of years. All evidence points to migrations from Asia and the logical route is by way of Bering Strait where the two continents are separated by only fifty-six miles of water broken by three islands. ”

“ It is still a doubt how far we exchange myths for assured records, when we enter upon the problems of pre-Columbian explorations, which it is the object of the present chapter to discuss. We are to deal with supposable colonizations, from which the indigenous population of America, as the Spaniards found it, was sprung, wholly or in part; and we are to follow the venturesome habits of navigators, who sought experience and commerce in a strange country, and only incidentally left possible traces of their blood in the peoples they surprised. ”

“ But they perpetuate no evidence of a native civilisation of elder times bearing the slightest analogy to that of Europe through all its historic centuries. The western hemisphere stands a world apart, with languages and customs essentially its own; and with man and his arts embraced within greatly narrower limits of development than in any other quarter of the globe, if we except Australia. The evolutionist may, indeed, be tempted by the absence not only of the anthropoid apes, but by all but the lowest families of the Primates, to regard man as a recent intruder on the American continent. ”

“ A daring hypothesis would make this continent an early, and perhaps the first home of the human species—a theory that would not implausibly solve certain difficulties, assuming that the differences which mark aboriginal North from aboriginal South America are due to the fact that the former continent was the meeting-place and confluence of two streams—a vastly ancient, but continuous, northward flow from the south, turned and coloured by a thinner and later wash of Asiatic sources. ”

“ If America be the oldest continent, paleontologically speaking, as Agassiz tells us, there appears to be some reason for looking to it as the spot where early traces of the race are to be found, and the fact would seem to warrant further study and investigation in connection with the indigenous people of our continent, thereby awakening new sources of inquiry among ethnologists. ”

“ In the Old World, human history has been traced to its beginnings through fossil remains suggesting a stage of development earlier than man. In the Western Hemisphere, however, no such remains have been found, which indicates that the American Indian must have immigrated here from another continent. In searching for his closest relatives, therefore, scientists are now agreed that certain physical peculiarities show the modern as well as the prehistoric Indian to be most closely linked to the peoples of eastern Asia. ”

“ Perhaps it is true that this country is the real cradle of the human race, and that from there the tide of migration flowed westward over Europe, sending one tributary stream down into Greece, and another down into Italy, and passing onwards in ever increasing volume, until it spread population, not only through Western Europe, but away, as industrious archæologists have whispered, conning their strange finds among the Incas of Peru and Mexico, to the great Western continent that lay beyond the fabled inland of Atlantis. ”

“ It requires the idea of a miracle to suppose that all men descend from one source. Kames, in Warden, Recherches, p. 203. 'The unsuccessful search after traces of an ante-Columbian intercourse with the New World, suffices to confirm the belief that, for unnumbered centuries throughout that ancient era, the Western Hemisphere was the exclusive heritage of nations native to its soil. Its sacred and sepulchral rites, its usages and superstitions, its arts, letters, metallurgy, sculpture, and architecture, are all peculiarly its own.' Wilson's Prehist. ”

“ How many aeons divided the totem coyote from the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus? Which is the primitive and parent flame, the sacred fire of Pueblo Estufas, of Greek Prytaneum, of Roman Vesta, of Persian Atish-khudahs? If the Laurentian system be the oldest upheaval of land, and its "dawn animal" the first evolution of life that left fossil footprints, where are all the missing links in ethnology, which would save science that rejects Genesis—the paradox of peopling the oldest known continent by immigration from those incalculably younger? ”

“ If this opinion is correct, and I believe it—if this skeleton does present the same type of physical conformation with all the tribes of our continent—then, indeed, do these crumbling bones declare, as with a voice from the grave, that we cannot go back to any ancient nation of the Old World for the builders of these cities; they are not the works of people who have passed away, and whose history is lost, but of the same great race which, changed, miserable, and degraded, still clings around their ruins. ”

“ This confusion in the native traditions results in dividing the writers on American antiquities, both in respect of the number of migrations and the direction whence they came, as also the time of them. It should be stated that there are some respectable authorities who doubt ancient migrations at all, holding the native population of America, and also its civilization, to be indigenous. ”

“ Other writers equally confident that the 156first ancestors of the American race were indigenous, have not so definitely expressed themselves as to the manner of their origin. [220] The most recent phase of the autochthonic theory is that which designates evolution as the means by which the continent was populated with human beings, developed from its own fauna. ”

“ But if for a moment superstition lost its terrors, this little flock of more intelligent incomers were powerless to resist the avenging hands of the million aboriginal barbarians. But we are not engaged in discussing the mode in which this people became extinct, but choose to confine ourselves to the questions, who were they, and where did they come from? ”

“ There is a definite barrier that has resisted movement across any possible land bridge until around 11,500 BP and this barrier was just as strong as the current barrier standing against the involvement of available but unstudied data, evidence, and just common sense. Given the antiquity of sites in South America that pre-date the oldest Clovis sites by thousands of years, evidence for early human migration to the mid-continent of North America should be sought in southern regions. There are plenty of data in the form of stone artifacts from which to study. ”

“ We think nothing of a Pueblo village 2500 years old, and it hardly jolts us when archaeologists put the sub-pedregal culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or 18,000 B.C. We hear rumours of still older things, too—of primitive man contemporaneous with extinct animals and known today only through a few fragmentary bones and artifacts—so that the idea of newness is fading out pretty rapidly. Europeans usually catch the sense of immemorial ancientness and deep deposits from successive life-streams better than we do. ”

“ Throughout the West Indies there is an entire absence of palæolithic remains. Those islands were first peopled by tribes in the polished stone stage of culture. In the valley of Mexico human remains have been disinterred from a volcanic deposit of supposed tertiary age, and you have all heard of those human footprints which Dr. Earl Flint has unearthed in Nicaragua. These are found under layers of compact volcanic tufas, separated by strata of sand and vegetable loam. There can be no doubt of their human origin or of their great antiquity ”

“ The evidence of artistic ability in the native races both of Central and Southern America is abundant; nor is the northern continent lacking in its specially artistic race. But the achievements of the ancient Mayas, Peruvians, or Mound-Builders, are of very recent date, compared with the palæolithic, or even the neolithic productions of Europe. It need not, therefore, excite our wonder to find American antiquaries welcoming a disclosure, only too strikingly analogous to the famous mammoth drawing of the La Madeleine cave. ”

“ But the assumption of uniformity in the ethnical characteristics of the various races of North and South America is untenable. All probabilities rather favour the idea of different ethnical centres, a diversity of origin, and considerable admixture of races. All evidence, moreover, whether physical or philological, whatever else it may prove, leaves no room for doubt as to a greatly prolonged period of isolation of the native races of the New World. Whether they came from the Mediterranean, in that old mythic dawn the memory of which survived in the legend of a submerged Atlantis ”

“ Since a comparison of the fauna of South America and Africa, and a survey of the sea-bottom between those continents, have dispelled the dream of the ancient Atlantis, and relegated that land connection at least to the eocene period of the tertiary, no one can suppose the American man to have migrated from Africa or southwestern Europe. ”

“ EARLY CULTURES IN NORTH AMERICA
The fact that skeletons of primitive forms of man have so far not been discovered in the Western Hemisphere does not mean that ancestral forms preceding modern man did not migrate to the New World in remote times. It is that erroneous idea which has caused some persons to reason that man arrived here only in the final glacial stage. ”

“ Curiously enough, the oldest traces of man as yet discovered in the New World are not only in South America, but in the south-eastern parts of South America. Although the most obvious recent land connection between the Old and New Worlds is the Aleutian chain of islands connecting Kamschatka with Alaska, the ethnologist is occasionally led to think by certain evidence that there may, both earlier and later, have existed another way of reaching western America from south-eastern Asia through Pacific archipelagoes and islets now sunk below the sea. ”

“ That flint and stone implements of every variety of form abound in the soil of the New World, has been established by ample proof; and if mere rudeness could be accepted as evidence of antiquity, many of them rival in this respect the rudest implements of the European drift. But it has to be kept in view that the indigenous tribes of America have scarcely even now abandoned the manufacture of implements of obsidian, flint, and stone, or of bone and ivory. ”

“ He rejects the idea that the native myths are distorted historical reminiscences and exaggerated statements respecting persons that ever really existed, and has been guided by the principle that "when the same, and that a very extraordinary, story is told by several tribes wholly apart in language and location, then the probabilities are enormous that it is not a legend, but a myth, and must be explained as such." ”

“ Bering Strait, the Aleutian Islands, and Polynesia. The route taken by no means depends upon the original habitat of the emigrants; thus the people of India may have emigrated to the north of Asia, and crossed Bering Strait, or the Chinese may have passed from one to the other of the Aleutian Islands until they reached the western continent. Bering Strait is, however, the most widely advocated, and perhaps most probable, line of communication. The narrow strait would scarcely hinder any migration either east or west, especially as it is frequently frozen over in winter. ”

“ If the migrants were a boating and fishing people voyaging north along the Asiatic shore, the 56-mile gap of Bering Strait, broken by the Diomede Islands, was a negligible barrier, since the greatest stretch of open water was only 23 miles across. If they found the strait frozen over, they would have followed the southern edge of the ice. Men of a more inland type, men less given to water travel, could have crossed to Alaska—as some do now—on the ice of winter. ”

“ Caravans, flat-boats, and dog-trains must be provided to transport supplies; and the vessels to be used at the end of the land journey must be built on the Pacific. The explorers were commissioned to levy tribute for food and fur on Tartar tribes as their caravans worked slowly eastward. Bering's first voyage does not concern America. He set out from Kamchatka on July 9, 1728, with forty-four men, and sailed far enough north to prove that Asia and America were not united by any Gamaland, and that the strait now bearing his name separated the two continents ”

“ Discoveries and investigations carried on during the 19th century have thrown much light on the splendid past of Central America. The still extant ruins of great buildings, unlike anything which is known in the old world, testify to the high culture attained in pre-Columbian days by several native peoples differing greatly from one another in speech and racial affinities. As a science the archaeology of Central America has scarcely yet emerged from its infancy. ”

“ But, assuming this to be true, the first migration of civilized people from South America must have taken place at a very distant period in the past, for it preceded not only the history indicated by the existing antiquities, but also an earlier history, during which the Peruvians and Central Americans grew to be as different from their ancestors as from each other. In each case, the development of civilization represented by existing monuments, so far as we can study it, appears to have been original. ”

“ The civilized life of the ancient Mexicans and Central Americans may have had its original beginning somewhere in South America, for they seem more closely related to the ancient South Americans than to the wild Indians north of the Mexican border; but the peculiar development of it represented by the ruins must have begun in the region where they are found. I find myself more and more inclined to the opinion that the aboriginal South Americans are the oldest people on this continent; that they are distinct in race ”

“ Smith, Cesnola, and Schliemann naturally cause us to turn with national pride to the rich antiquarian fields in our own land. Very satisfactory results have been obtained within a few years in the exploration of Mound-works and the Cliff-dwellings of the West. A just view of the civilization of the builders of these remains, however, requires that it be considered in connection with the traditional history and civilization of the ancient races of Mexico and Central America, so marked was the influence of the ancient peoples of this continent upon each other. ”

“ He does not think it necessary, therefore, either to account for the existence of those monuments with the ruins of which the soil is so thickly strewn by an immigration from India or Egypt, nor to reduce them to the proportions and character of the Pueblo remains in New Mexico, in order to prove that America, in contrast with the Eastern continent, has had but one original type of development, and that the lowest. ”

“ The Mexican and Central American ruins make it certain that in ancient times an important civilization existed in that part of the continent, which must have begun at a remote period in the past. If they have any significance, this must be accepted as an ascertained fact. A large proportion of them had been forgotten in the forests, or become mythical and mysterious, long before the arrival of the Spaniards.
In 1520, three hundred and fifty years ago, the forest which so largely covers Yucatan, Guatemala, and Chiapa was growing as it grows now ”

“ In fact, these last named ruins appear to date with the primitive wanderings of the cultivated tribes, before they established their seats in Yucatan and Guatimala, and erected those more finished monuments which could only result from the combined efforts of populous communities, acting under the favorable influence of peace and prosperity. Every race has had its center or centers of comparative civilization. The American aborigines had theirs in Peru, Bogota and Mexico. ”

“ Some inquirers, not always without hesitation, suggest that the Indians inhabiting the United States two hundred years ago were degenerate descendants of the Mound-Builders. The history of the world shows that civilized communities may lose their enlightenment, and sink to a condition of barbarism; but the degraded descendants of a civilized people usually retain traditional recollections of their ancestors, or some traces of the lost civilization, perceptible in their customs and their legendary lore. The barbarism of the wild Indians of North America had nothing of this kind. ”

“ Since which time the fierce fanaticism that overwhelmed the New World empire, has pressed like an incubus upon the dominant race, and held it fast while all the world around were making the most rapid strides forward.
No indigenous civilization exists in America to-day, yet the effects of a former culture are not altogether absent. The descendant of the Aztec, Maya, and Quiché, is still of superior mind and haughtier spirit than his roving brother who boasts of none but a savage ancestry. ”