444 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1950 



actual succession of cranial types, the functional theory falls com- 

 pletely to the ground, for if applied here it would mean that 2,000 

 years of hard chewing had produced not a long and narrow but a 

 broader and more rounded form of skull. 



Similar difficulties are encountered in attempting to explain the 

 broad and massive face of the Eskimo as a progressive response to the 

 energetic use of the jaws, for the old Birnirk Eskimos and the early 

 population in the Aleutian Islands already exhibit facial diameters 

 comparable in general to those of other Eskimo groups. The Mongols 

 from Urga have facial measurements almost identical with Birnirk 

 and show an accentuated development of the malar and upper maxil- 

 lary regions comparable in every way to that of the Eskimo. Since 

 the Mongols' diet of milk and cheese is not one requiring excessive use 

 of the jaws, the functional theory cannot be adduced to explain their 

 large and heavy faces. The total evidence, therefore, sustains the 

 views of Hooton, Jenness, and Birket-Smith that the Eskimos have 

 inherited and not acquired their peculiar skull form. 



We may inquire, then, whether it is possible to identify the ancestral 

 type, either in America or Asia, A number of attempts have been 

 made to establish relationships between various Indian and Eskimo 

 groups on the basis of either skeletal material or measurements on 

 the living. Though we need not subject these claims to detailed scru- 

 tiny, it will be pertinent to review them briefly to see if they meet 

 certain minimum requirements. For example, when physical resem- 

 blances between living Indians and Eskimos are interpreted as evidence 

 of a basic relationship we need to know first whether the resemblances 

 in question could be due to recent intermixture between the two groups ; 

 and second, whether the groups compared are representative of the 

 original populations. 



The latter consideration brings up the highly important question 

 of white mixture, something too frequently ignored by anthropolo- 

 gists who have concerned themselves with the problem of the racial 

 origin of the Eskimo. In parts of Labrador and West Greenland the 

 infiltration of European blood has been going on for some 200 years, 

 not to mention the probability of still earlier Norse mixture. In 

 southern Alaska, particularly in the Aleutian Islands, the process of 

 miscegenation began with the arrival of the Russian fur hunters in 

 the middle of the eighteenth century. In northern Alaska the process 

 was delayed for another hundred years, when the whaling fleets 

 appeared in Bering Sea and the Arctic. Today, white mixture is 

 apparent in many of the Eskimos of the Bristol Bay-Kuskokwim 

 region, mainly the result of Russian contacts, and individuals of 

 mixed Eskimo and white ancestry comprise an appreciable minority 

 among the more northerly Eskimos. On the Diomede Islands, for 

 example, most of the children and a considerable number of adults 



