ANTHROPOLOGY IN WESTERN HEMISPHERE AND PACIFIC ISLANDS. 45 



If SO, did they reach Japan or the continent of Asia? Or did they pass on to 

 South America? No one knows, but the problem is strung along the Pacific, 

 and it fascinates us while it waits. 



The diverse Pacific island problem is a unit problem. Scattered as the 

 Pacific peoples are in their numerous island homes, the warm languorous sea, 

 more than anything else, has made them what they are. While the sea 

 separates them, it binds them together. It is confidently believed that this 

 unit problem of the Pacific island peoples can be solved wathin a reasonable 

 length of time, if it is approached through physical, ethnic, cultural, and 

 prehistoric studies among the five great Oceanic ethnic groups. 



THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. 



ORIGIN OF THE ABORIGINAL AMERICAN. 



Fundamental among the unsolved large anthropological problems of the 

 Western Hemisjohere is that of the origin of man in America. Whence did 

 the ancestors of the American Indian and Eskimo come? The answers have 

 been numerous and varied. Some who believe in the plural origin of the 

 human family regard the American continent as the birthplace of one of the 

 independent branches. Some who believe in the single origin hold that 

 America may be the original home of the human family from which all the 

 diverse races and ethnic groups of the earth sprung. Recently the discovery 

 of certain skeletal remains in Argentine has led to a theory of this sort. 



For many reasons, geographical, geological, zoological, and anthropo- 

 logical, it may apparently be wisely assumed to-day that man is not autoch- 

 thonous in America, but that he migrated here from some earlier home. 



Several anthropologists believe in the dual or plural origin of our aborig- 

 ines. Ratzel reminds us that isolation for sufficient time would result in the 

 production of a unit race from two or more ancestral stocks. This is pos- 

 sible by means of amalgamation and the selective influence of environment. 



Anders Retzius, on the basis of two types of American crania, grouped 

 the American aborigines in two extensive geographic divisions. The western 

 group he classed with the brachycephahc Mongols and Malays, and to the 

 eastern group he ascribed affinities with the dolichocephalic Berbers and 

 Guanches by migrations from northwestern Africa and the Canary Islands. 



Keane also recognizes two primitive types. He traces the dolicho- 

 cephalic type to a migration from Europe in palaeolithic times over a supposed 

 land-bridge through the British Islands, Iceland, and Greenland; the Eskimo, 

 and Botocudo and tribes farther southward in South America are repre- 

 sentatives of those migrants. He derives the brachycephahc type, in greater 

 numbers and in several migrations, from Asia in later or neolithic times; 

 certain short-headed tribes in the highlands of Mexico are representatives of 

 this later movement. The remaining aborigines, he believes, are a product 

 of a blending of the distinct European and Asiatic types. 



