424 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1950 



in the central archipelago of Canada, the high Arctic culture typified 

 by the snow house, the dog sled, and various ingenious methods of 

 hunting on the sea ice. This complex was "an outgrowth of an orig- 

 inal North Indian form of culture, the winter side of which had be- 

 come specially and strongly developed by adaptation to the winter 

 ice of the Arctic Ocean" (Steensby, 1916, p. 186). Steensby thought 

 that Coronation Gulf was the region where this adaptation had taken 

 place. Belonging to a later stage were such features as kayak hunt- 

 ing on the open sea, the umiak, whaling, and the bird dart. These 

 elements, lacking among the Eskimos of the Central regions, were 

 characteristic especially of sub-Arctic Alaska and Greenland. 



The latest and most comprehensive expression of this viewpoint is 

 that of Birket-Smith (1929, 1930, 1936). His theory, though cor- 

 responding essentially with Steensby's, is considerably more elaborate 

 and detailed. Birket-Smith believes that the Eskimo culture orig- 

 inated in the Barren Grounds west of Hudson Bay and that the Cari- 

 bou Eskimos now living there are the direct descendants of the "Proto- 

 Eskimos." Isolated in the interior, the Proto-Eskimos, like the mod- 

 ern Caribou Eskimos, lived by hunting the caribou and by fishing in 

 lakes and rivers, in winter through holes in the ice. Later some of 

 them — the "Palae-Eskimos" — moved to the seashore and learned to 

 hunt seals by what is know as the "maupok" method, harpooning the 

 seals at their breathing holes in the ice. The conversion of ice fishing 

 into seal hunting on the sea ice was thus the first and most important 

 step in the formation of Eskimo culture. Birket-Sraith's theory has 

 been summarized as follows : 



Originally the Proto-Eskimo lived inland from Hudson Bay and farther west. 

 Whereas some of them, of whom the Caribou Eskimo are the last survivors, 

 remained on the Barren Grounds, others resorted to the coast between Corona- 

 tion Gulf and the Boothia peninsula, where they adapted their living to the 

 sea and were thus enabled to spread along the coast ; this is the so-called Palae- 

 Eskimo stage. At a later period the far richer Neo-Eskimo culture came into 

 existence in Alaska ; it spread as far to the east as Greenland, but at present 

 it is not known from the central regions except from the so-called Thule culture 

 which was brought to light by the archeological investigations of the Fifth Thule 

 Expedition, being otherwise obliterated by a modern Eschato-Eskimo advance 

 of inland tribes that penetrated to the sea and constituted the recent Central 

 Eskimo. [Birket-Smith, 1930, p. 608.] 



The opposite, or Asiatic, theory of the origin of the Eskimo has 

 also had numerous supporters. First to express this opinion were 

 the early explorers, who observed that the Eskimos had a distinctly 

 Mongoloid appearance. Most of the nineteenth-century anatomists 

 and anthropologists classified the Eskimos with the Asiatics, and later 

 anthropologists such as Furst and Hansen, Hrdlicka, and Hooton have 

 concurred in this viewpoint. Ethnologists and archeologists such as 

 Thalbitzer, Hatt, Bogoras, Kroeber, Mathiassen, Jenness, and Zolo- 



