THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF THE ESKIMO — COLLINS 425 



tarev believe that Eskimo culture is essentially a product of the Old 

 World. Students of Eskimo linguistics — Thalbitzer, Sapir, Bogoras, 

 Jenness — all seek the origin of the language in Alaska or Siberia 

 rather than in Canada or Greenland : and Sauvageot and Uhlenbeck 

 have gone further and claimed a relationship between Eskimo and 

 Ural-Altaic or Indo-European, the two major language stocks of the 

 Old World. As will be shown later, the more recent archeological 

 and somatological evidence confirms this point of view and seems to 

 point conclusively to Eurasia as the place of origin of the Eskimo 

 culture and race type. 



The theory that has aroused more discussion perhaps than any 

 other is that which derives the Eskimos from the Upper Paleolithic 

 cave dwellers of western Europe. Boj^d Dawkins and Sollas, the 

 principal champions of this view, pointed to numerous resemblances 

 between Eskimo and Paleolithic implements and art which they 

 interpreted as evidence that the Eskimos were the actual descendants 

 of Paleolithic man who had followed the reindeer northward at the 

 close of the Glacial period, and at a later time spread eastward to 

 Bering Strait. Physical evidence in support of the hypothesis was 

 brought forward in 18S9 by Testut, who claimed that a Magdalenian 

 skull found in a rock shelter near Perigueux in the commune of Chan- 

 celade, France, could scarcely be distinguished from that of an Eskimo. 



The theory of a racial or cultural connection between Eskimo and 

 Paleolithic man has been opposed by a number of authorities though 

 in later years it has received the support of Sullivan, Morant, and 

 von Eickstedt. In general, the reaction of anthropologists has been 

 one of skepticism or indifference, the prevailing attitude being that 

 the idea was too spectacular and speculative to be scientifically valid. 

 The postulated cultural connection seemed doubtful because some of 

 the traits compared were of uncertain function ; others were too 

 simple and generalized or too widespread in their distribution to 

 be indicative of a specific or exclusive relationship; and still others, 

 as we now loiow, were traits characteristic of modern but not of 

 ancient Eskimo culture. When Dawkins and Sollas wrote, there were 

 no archeological finds from Siberia to bridge the enormous gap in 

 time and space between Paleolithic man of western Europe and the 

 modern Eskimo, nor was there any knowledge of prehistoric Eskimo 

 culture. Now that excavations have been made in the American 

 Arctic and Siberia, the postulated cultural affinities between Eskimo 

 and Paleolithic appear in a different light. The recent excavations 

 have produced new and unexpected evidence of relationship between 

 the oldest Eskimo cultures, the early Siberian Neolithic, and the 

 European Mesolithic (Collins, 1943). As the Mesolithic was a direct 

 outgrowth of the Paleolithic, the Dawkins-Sollas theory may not have 

 been so fanciful as it once seemed. 



