WAS MIDDLE AMERICA PEOPLED FROM ASIA? 3 



constitute the African or negro subspecies of man.' ' By bringing 

 together isolated features which have resemblances in common, the 

 American Indian has been traced to nearly every known stock. Mr. 

 Henry W. Henshaw, in an admirable address entitled Who are the 

 American Indians ? says : " If you have special bias or predilection 

 you have only to choose for yourself. If there be any among you 

 who decline to find the ancestors of our Indians among the Jews, 

 Phoenicians, Scandinavians, Irish, "Welsh, Egyptians, or Tartars, 

 then you still have a choice among the Hindu, Malay, Polynesian, 

 Chinese, or Japanese, or indeed among almost any other of the chil- 

 dren of men." Had this address been written a few years later he 

 might have added Hittite! 



There are two propositions involved in the controversy as to the 

 Asiatic origin of the American race: the one is that America was 

 peopled from Asia by invasions or migrations in pre-savage or pre- 

 glacial times; the other is that the peculiar civilization of Central 

 America was induced by Buddhist monks, who traveled from Asia 

 to Mexico and Central America in the fifth century of our era. 

 Those who sustain the first thesis are without exception men trained 

 in the science of anthropology; those who sustain the second thesis 

 are with a few conspicuous exceptions travelers, geographers, sino- 

 logues, missionaries, and the like. 



If Asia should ever prove to be the cradle of the human race, or 

 of any portion of it which had advanced well beyond the creature 

 known as Pithecanthropus erectus, then unquestionably an Asian 

 people may be accounted the progenitors of the American Indians. 

 Any effort, however, to establish an identity at this stage would 

 probably take us far beyond the origin of speech or the ability to 

 fabricate an implement. 



The controversy has not raged on this ground, however; the 

 numerous volumes and memoirs on the subject have dealt almost 

 exclusively with culture contacts or direct invasions from Asia in 

 our era, and more particularly with the supposed visits of Chinese 

 Buddhist monks to Mexico and Central America already alluded to. 

 Believing in the unity of the^ human race, the dispersion of the 

 species seems more naturally to have occurred along the northern 

 borders of the great continents rather than across the wide ocean. 

 From the naturalist's standpoint the avenues have been quite as 

 open for the circumpolar distribution of man as they have been 

 for the circumpolar distribution of other animals and plants down 

 to the minutest land snail and low fungus. The ethnic, resemblances 

 supposed to exist between the peoples of the two sides of the Pacific 

 may be the result of an ancient distribution around the northern 

 regions of the globe. Even to-day social relations are said to exist 



