Man made his appearance on the western continent unnumbered ages ago,
not unlikely before the close of the glacial period. It is possible that
human life began in Asia and western North America sooner than on either
shore of the Atlantic. Nothing wholly forbids the belief that America
was even the cradle of the race, or one of several cradles, though most
scientific writers prefer the view that our species came hither from
Asia. De Nadaillac judges it probable that the ocean was thus crossed
not at Behring Strait alone, but along a belt of equatorial islands as
well. We may think of successive waves of such immigration–perhaps the
easiest way to account for certain differences among American races.
It is, at any rate, an error to speak of the primordial Americans as
derived from any Asiatic stock at present existing or known to history.
The old Americans had scarcely an Asiatic feature. Their habits and
customs were emphatically peculiar to themselves. Those in which they
agreed with the trans-Pacific populations, such as fashion of weapons
and of fortifications, elements of folk-lore, religious ideas,
traditions of a flood, belief in the destruction of the world by fire,
and so on, are nearly all found the world over, the spontaneous
creations of our common human intelligence.
The original American peoples, various and unlike as they were, agreed
in four traits, three of them physical, one mental, which mark them off
as in all likelihood primarily of one stock after all, and as different
from any Old World men: (1) They had low, retreating foreheads. (2)
Their hair was black. (3) It was also of a peculiar texture, lank, and
cylindrical in section, never wavy. And (4) their languages were
polysynthetic, forming a class apart from all others in the world. The
peoples of America, if from Asia, must date back to a time when speech
itself was in its infancy.
