452 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 



ever, has never been proved, any more than the corollary explanation 

 that the peculiar Eskimo skull form is itself the product of these 

 same functional forces. The cranial and facial features mentioned are 

 known to be hereditary, for they occur in children and infants as well 

 as adults, and as they are already present in the earliest Eskimo crania, 

 it is difficult to see how they can be explained as functional adaptations. 



It is not too much to require that theories on as important a subject 

 as the racial origin of the Eskimo should utilize all the available 

 evidence. However, it cannot be said that any of the theories thus far 

 advanced have fulfilled this requirement. The attempts that have 

 been made to prove an Indian origin for the Eskimo are subject to 

 criticism on several counts: (1) Measurements of living Indians 

 and Eskimos have been compared without inquiry as to the possibility 

 of white mixture, even though photographs of the particular Indians 

 and Eskimos and the history of long-continued white contact leave 

 no doubt that in some cases extensive mixture of this kind has oc- 

 curred; (2) relationships have been postulated on the basis of head 

 and face measurements alone, without taking into account differences 

 in bodily proportions, nonmetrical facial features, and general phys- 

 iognomy; (3) widely separated Eskimo groups, or even the Eskimo as 

 a whole, are assumed to have originated from an Indian stock such 

 as Cree or Chipewyan, 1,000 or more years ago, because the Hudson 

 Bay Eskimos, whose territory adjoins that of the Indians, resemble 

 the latter in certain head and face measurements, without considering 

 the alternative explanation that the resemblances in question may be 

 due to recent intermixture; (4) to explain certain metrical resem- 

 blances between distant Eskimo and Indian groups, large-scale migra- 

 tions of Indians from the interior of Canada to the Arctic coast have 

 been postulated, sufficient to absorb or replace the original Eskimo 

 populations, though the evidence of linguistics, archeology, and 

 physical anthropology shows that no such Indian irruptions could 

 possibly have occurred; (5) comparisons of Eskimo and Indian 

 crania, leading to theories of common ancestry of the two groups, like 

 the similar comparisons on the living, have considered measurements 

 alone, to the exclusion of morphological, nonmetrical features that are 

 characteristic of Eskimo crania but not of Indian; (6) and finally, 

 none of the theories advanced — except the dubious functional theory — 

 explain the origin of the long, narrow, and high-headed type charac- 

 teristic of Greenland and the earlier periods in northern Alaska. 



We will search in vain in America for any cranial form from which 

 the highly specialized Eskimo type may likely have been derived. 

 There are numerous long-headed Indian groups such as the Lagoa 

 Santa type of Brazil, the early California and Texas Indians, and 

 some of the northeastern tribes who in skull dimensions alone re- 

 semble the Eskimo. The resemblance, however, does not extend to 



