PKEHISTORIC CULTURE WAVES FROM ASIA TO 

 AMERICA 1 



By Diamond Jenness 

 National Museum of Canada, Ottawa 



The recent excavations of Collins on St. Lawrence Island and at 

 other places around the Bering Sea " seem to bring out one very 

 important point, viz, that there has been no extensive migration 

 across Bering Strait, unless it be of Eskimo, since the early centuries 

 of the Christian Era. The Eskimo culture strata in that region show 

 no profound disturbance such as one would expect from an invading 

 horde, but rather a gradual change, stimulated to some extent by 

 Asiatic as well as strictly American influences, but not by the intru- 

 sion of an alien people. Now Nordenskiold and others ^ have proved 

 that although a few Polynesians may on one or more occasions have 

 reached the shores of America, there has never been any transoceanic 

 migration large enough to affect profoundly the physical composition 

 of the aborigines in the New World or the evolution of their cultures. 

 We can rule out likewise any immigration by way of Kamchatka and 

 the Aleutian Archipelago, if for no other reason than that the archi- 

 pelago has yielded no traces of earlier remains than those of the 

 Aleutian Eskimo, who undoubtedly reached their home from Amer- 

 ica. Bering Strait, therefore, was the only route of ingress into this 

 hemisphere, and the forefathers of every known division of Indians 

 must already have crossed this strait by the beginning of the Christian 

 Era. 



This conclusion harmonizes well with the results of linguistic 

 studies. Hitherto we have utterly failed to link up any American 

 Indian language with any language or group of languages in the Old 

 World. Thus Rivet's effort to connect the Hokan dialects of Cali- 

 fornia with Malayo-Polynesian, and some Patagonian languages with 



1 Address of the retiring president of the American Anthropological Association, delivered 

 at Chicago, 111., on December 29, 1939. Reprinted by permission from Journal of The 

 Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 30, No. 1, January 15, 1940. 



" Collins, H. B., Archeology of St. Lawrence Island. Smithsonian Misc. Coll., vol. 96, 

 No. 1, 1937. 



» Cf. NordenskiOld, E., Origin of the Indian civilizations in South America. Comparative 

 Ethnographical Studies, vol. 9, 1931. 



Dixon, Roland B., The long voyages of the Polynesians. Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc, vol. 74, 

 No. 3, pp. 167-175, 1934. 



383 



