PREHISTORIC CULTURE WAVES — ^JENNESS 393 



people, and perhaps also the modern Caribou Eskimo. Both groups 

 alike, however, kept a small breed of dog for hunting and for eating. 

 Then, about the end of the Birnirk phase at Barrow, sometime in 

 the first millennium A. D., a larger, sturdier breed of dog was intro- 

 duced into Arctic America from Siberia, where dog traction, if not 

 earlier than reindeer traction, arose as a substitute. About the same 

 time, too, whaling originated in the same region or was introduced 

 from Siberia also. Under the combined impulses of dog traction and 

 whaling certain bands of these north Alaskan Eskimo trekked east- 

 ward, carrying their Thule culture with them; and in the eastern 

 Arctic they encountered and merged with the Dorset people. Dog 

 traction then became general throughout the whole of the Arctic, 

 though St. Lawrence Island, being in a kind of back eddy, did not 

 receive it until rather late. The smaller breed of dog m the west and 

 east became extinct, but in Frobisher Bay a mixed group of Thule and 

 Dorset Eskimo retamed and ate it down to the sixteenth century, 

 when it disappeared there also. 



You will note that I have pictured the original homeland of the 

 Eskimo, not in America, but in northeast Siberia about the mouths 

 of the Kolyma and Indigirka Rivers. It would not surprise me if it 

 were in this region, rather than in northern Alaska, that the Birnirk 

 culture evolved, and even the subsequent Thule. Yet it is probable 

 that the homeland as thus defined is far too narrow, that it should be 

 extended westward. Certainly in post-Christian times there were 

 Eskimo-like people far to the westward, on the Yamal Peninsula, for 

 example, at the mouth of the Ob, where Chernezov has excavated 

 three of their earth lodges,^^ probably also in northeast Russia, since 

 the kayak and bidarka are reported from that region as late as the 

 sixteenth century.^" If some antecedent to the Old Bering Sea, Birnirk 

 and Dorset cultures could be discovered on the Arctic coast of western 

 Siberia, it would vastly lessen the gap, both m time and space, be- 

 tween the historic Eskimo cultures and those of the epipaleolithic 

 peoples of northern Europe to which they bear a considerable 

 resemblance. 



In expounding his fertile theory of two culture layers in northern 

 Eurasia and North America, an earlier coastal or ice-hunting layer 

 and a later inland or snowshoe layer, Hatt justly signaled out the 

 Eskimo as belated survivors of the ice-hunting stage who had adapted 

 themselves to life on the seashore and to the hunting of sea mammals. 

 If, as I have attempted to show, this adaptation occurred on the 

 Arctic coast of Siberia, not later than the second millennium B. C. and 



"Cf. Zolotarev, A., The ancient culture of north Asia. Amer. Anthrop., vol. 40, p. 15, 

 1938. 



»Cf. MacRitchie, D., Journ, Roy. Anthrop. Inst., vol. 42, pp. 493-510, 1912. 



