THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF THE ESKIMO — COLLINS 443 



of tough food, are supposed to have compressed the skull laterally, 

 tJiereby producing the long, narrow, keel-shaped vault so character- 

 istic of the race. The same explanation is often advanced to account 

 for the presence of mandibular and palatine tori — the bony swellings 

 frequently found on the lower jaw and palate — as well as the strongly 

 developed jaAvs, excellent teeth, and massiveness of the face in general. 

 There are, however, serious objections to the "hard-chewing" hy- 

 pothesis that its advocates do not take into account. In the first place, 

 one may question the necessity of calling in a specific and functional 

 explanation of the Eskimos' dolichocephaly when there are many other 

 long-headed races, such as the prehistoric Texas cave dwellers, the 

 Perique of Lower California, the Veddas of Ceylon, and various 

 European and African peoples whose skull form is obviously not to 

 be explained on this basis, since their faces and jaws, which would 

 be the parts most directly affected by vigorous chewing, are for the 

 most part rather small and weakly developed. Also, if skull form 

 and facial development both resulted from hard chew^ing, why should 

 some Eskimos have large faces and long heads and others large faces 

 and broad heads? 



Stefansson, who has lived for long periods among the Eskimos and 

 who can speak with authority on their dietary habits, contends that 

 there is no factual basis for the belief that they chew more vigorously 

 than other people. He points out that boiled meat, which is the 

 Eskimo's first preference, requires very little chewing, that raw meat 

 is usually not chewed but gulped down like an oyster, and that frozen 

 fish, when sufficiently thawed to be edible, is about the consistency of 

 hard ice cream (Stefansson, 1946). The only really tough food eaten 

 by the Eskimos is dried fish and meat, but the use of such food is by 

 no means universal, for there are many districts where it is seldom 

 eaten. 



There are two specific facts that alone are enough to invalidate the 

 theory that the typical long and narrow skull of the Eskimo is an 

 adaptation resulting from vigorous use of the masticatory muscles: 

 (1) The Eskimos who consume the greatest quantities of really tough 

 food — dried fish and meat — are those living in Alaska, especially to 

 the south of Bering Strait. Yet the skulls of these Alaskan Eskimos 

 are not long and narrow but relatively short and very wide, in fact 

 wider by a considerable margin than those of any other Eskimo 

 group. (2) If the assumed lengthening of the head were a functional 

 and progressive condition we should expect the most ancient crania 

 to be at least somewhat shorter and wider than the modern. However, 

 exactly the reverse is true, for as already pointed out the oldest skulls 

 from northern Alaska are of the extremely long, high, narrow type. 

 Similarly, the modern broad-headed Aleuts and Kodiak Islanders 

 were preceded by earlier oval-headed populations. In view of this 



