442 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN tNSTlTUTlON, 1950 



Skeletal remains of the modern Hudson Bay tribes are lacking but 

 Birket-Smith's (1940) measurements show that the present-day Cari- 

 bou, Netsilik, and Iglulik Eskimos are closer to the Cree and Chip- 

 ewyan Indians than to other Eskimos. This resemblance is borne 

 out visually, for the photographs of most of these Central Eskimos 

 definitely suggest Indian, or in some cases European, mixture. 



The Alaskan Eskimos in general are taller and more broad-headed 

 than most of their eastern kinsmen. This has usually been attributed 

 to Indian mixture. Unquestionably there has been ample opportunity 

 in Alaska for this to have occurred, especially along the rivers where 

 the Eskimos come into direct contact with the interior Athapaskans. 

 Seltzer's analysis of Stefansson's measurements showed that the 

 Nunatagmiut, an inland Eskimo group living along the Colville Eiver 

 in north Alaska, differ sharply from other Eskimos and conform 

 more to the Indian type (Seltzer, 1933). In the same way, the Eski- 

 mos on the Kobuk and other northern rivers, and occasionally even 

 some of those in the coastal settlements of northern Alaska, are much 

 more Indian in appearance than Eskimo ; this is also true of some of 

 the Kuskokwim and Yukon Eskimos. 



Elsewhere in Alaska, Eskimo-Indian admixture is much less appar- 

 ent, and it is questionable whether the physical type of the other 

 Alaskan Eskimo groups has been seriously affected by Indian contact, 

 at least in recent centuries. The modern Eskimos along the coast 

 from Barrow to Bering Strait are of the generalized northern Eskimo 

 type. Though they do not exhibit the hyper-Eskimo features of the 

 old Birnirk population they are still Eskimo in every respect, being 

 practically identical with the old Thule type of the central Arctic 

 (Fischer-M0ller, 1937). At Bering Strait and a few other places on 

 Seward Peninsula the long-headed Birnirk type has survived to the 

 present time. The Alaskan Eskimos south of Seward Peninsula dif- 

 fer from those to the north in having shorter, broader, and lower 

 heads, broader faces and noses. They resemble rather closely 

 Hrdlicka's "pre-Koniag," the early oblong-headed type from Kodiak 

 Island, which, on the basis of archeological data, may have an anti- 

 quity of around 2,000 years. 



The problem is to account for the origin of the two oldest Eskimo 

 types of which we have knowledge, the highly specialized, extremely 

 long-headed northern type, represented by the Birnirk crania, and 

 the more generalized, but equally ancient oblong-headed type of south 

 Alaska. 



Before proceeding further we may digress to mention here one 

 explanation that has been advanced repeatedly and that would solve 

 the problem very simply by asserting that the most pronounced fea- 

 tures of the Eskimo skull are the result of functional adaptation. 

 The muscles of mastication, powerfully developed through chewing 



