450 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1950 



There are likewise no indications of an Indian irruption at Bering 

 Strait. Skeletal material" from a number of late prehistoric and 

 recent sites on the south and west coasts of Seward Peninsula shows 

 that the old long-headed Eskimo type has persisted there into modern 

 times. This is true even at Wales where measurements on the living, 

 taken by Weyer in 1928, revealed the supposed afiinity with the Chipe- 

 wyans. Many of the Wales people, however, are mixed-bloods, as 

 the present writer knows from personal observation and as Weyer's 

 photographs, published by Shapiro, also clearly show. 



The principal reasons for the physical differences between the 

 modern Eskimos of northern Alaska and their early Birnirk-type 

 ancestors may safely be stated as (1) white mixture, (2) population 

 movements within the Eskimo territory, such as the late return 

 movement of Thule Eskimos from Canada to northern Alaska, and the 

 migration of broad-headed Siberian Eskimos of Chukchee type to 

 St. Lawrence Island beginning in Punuk times, and (3) at some places 

 a certain amount of Indian blood that has been absorbed as a result 

 of direct or indirect contacts between the Eskimos and the Alaskan 

 Athapaskans. On the other hand, there is no evidence whatever of 

 a mass movement or even infiltration of Indians from the interior 

 to the Arctic or Bering Sea coasts at any time in the past. 



Comparisons of Eskimo and Indian skeletal material have led to 

 still other theories. Shapiro (1934) demonstrated a close metrical 

 resemblance between the Huron Indians of southern Ontario and 

 the Point Barrow, Seward Peninsula, and Nunivak Eskimos, which 

 he felt indicated a common origin for these groups. Hrdlicka con- 

 cluded from his study of the "Pre-Koniags" that these earliest inhabi- 

 tants of Kodiak Island were "physically related slightly to the 

 Eskimo, but much more so to the Algonkian" (1944, p. 434). The 

 lower-headed "Pre-Aleuts" from the Aleutian Islands, on the other 

 hand, bore a close resemblance to the Sioux : "The characteristics of 

 the pre-Aleut and Sioux skulls are seen to be so close that the anthro- 

 pologist would seem justified in assuming that the two groups had a 

 common and not very far back ancestry" (Hrdlicka, 1945, p. 583). 

 However, the striking differences between Pre-Aleut and Sioux long 

 bones, both in size and proportions, created a doubt as to their common 

 ancestry (1945, p. 584). 



Wliat is the significance of the very close metrical resemblance 

 between these widely separated peoples? First, we may question the 

 view that the Pre-Koniag are more closely related to Algonkian than 

 to Eskimo. Hrdlicka showed that the Pre-Koniag were very different 

 from Eskimos when compared with a pooled series of the Eskimo 

 in general, including those from Greenland and Labrador. However, 

 if the Pre-Koniag are compared with the Eskimo groups nearest to 

 them geographically — those along the Bering Sea coast north to 



