PREHISTORIC CULTURE WAVES — ^JENNESS 385 



The geographical position of the Athapaskan Indian tribes along 

 the pathway from Bering Strait toward the Equator, the late date 

 (about A. D. 1000) when their advance columns reached the South- 

 west of the United States, the comparatively minor changes in their 

 dialects from the Mackenzie Delta to Arizona, and the still demon- 

 strable affinity of their language (if we may trust Sapir) to the 

 Slnitic tongues of eastern Asia, all suggest that their movement into 

 America did not long precede the Christian Era. There are faint 

 indications that they may have entered this continent, or at least 

 have advanced south from Alaska, in two waves, one considerably 

 earlier than the other ; for it is noticeable that the most divergent or 

 archaic-seeming dialects (e. g., Haida and Tsetsaut) lie on the west 

 side of the Rockies, where the snowshoe and the wooden toboggan 

 so omnipresent in the Mackenzie River Basin seem to have been un- 

 known in pre-European times. There are faint indications, also, 

 that their irruption into the Mackenzie River Basin created a con- 

 siderable displacement of other peoples who were occupying this 

 region at the time, or were located on its outskirts." A recent botani- 

 cal investigation by Dr. Raup suggests that the grasslands of the 

 Peace River area, perhaps, too, the forest zone along the northern 

 edge of the plains, were muskeg land or tundra no longer ago than 

 2,000 or 3,000 years, and that the present-day bison and moose were 

 preceded by herds of caribou. Presumably, the Eskimo of those 

 days extended much farther south than they do now and were pushed 

 eastward and northeastward by the invading Athapaskans. I in- 

 cline to think that it was at this period that the Caribou Eskimo 

 were restricted to their present home on the Barren Lands west of 

 Hudson Bay; and that a kindred group of Eskimo fugitives occu- 

 pied the coasts of the eastern Arctic, where they developed that mys- 

 terious Dorset culture, which extended in prehistoric times from 

 Newfoundland to Greenland. 



In addition to driving out the Eskimo, the Athapaskans may have 

 dislodged some Algonquian tribes, as Birket-Smith believes, and 

 started them on a movement that carried them into the Labrador 

 Peninsula. Certainly the traditions of these Montagnais and Naskapi 

 Indians bring them from the west, and the strange stone culture dis- 

 covered by Strong near Nain," on the Labrador coast, despite its 

 distinctly Algonquian flavor, seems so alien to them that we may 

 ascribe it tentatively perhaps to some early group that was later 



»Cf. Birket-Smlth, KaJ, Folk-wanderings and culture drifts in northern North America. 

 Journ. See. Americanistos Paris, n. s., vol. 22, pp. 26-29, 1930. 



• Strong, W. D., A stone culture from northern Labrador and its relation to the Eskimo- 

 like cultures of the northeast. Amer. Anthrop., vol. 32, pp. 126-144, 1934. Cf. the review 

 by Wlntemberg, W. J., in Geogr. Rev., Oct. 1930, p. 673. 



