THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF THE ESKIMO — COLLINS 453 



the face, which in all cases is entirely different, nor do any of the 

 Indian crania possess those minor but distinctive Eskimo features 

 such as the thickened tympanic plate, the high frequency of man- 

 dibular and palatine tori, or the very narrow and "pinched-up" nasal 

 bones. 



In the Old World the situation is almost reversed. We know of no 

 living Asiatic people who have skulls of the very long, high, and 

 narrow Eskimo type. The Eskimo face, on the contrary, is so dis- 

 tinctly Mongoloid that we can only conclude that it has an Asiatic 

 ancestry. The living Eskimos exhibit a number of other obvious 

 Mongoloid features such as skin color and hair, nose form, high fre- 

 quency of the epicanthic or Mongolian fold of the eye, and shortness 

 of arms and legs in relation to the trunk. These features bring the 

 Eskimos into close relationship to the Asiatics, making them in fact 

 the most Mongoloid of all American aborigines. Most anthropol- 

 ogists would probably agree with Hooton that if it were not for the 

 Esldmos' non-Mongoloid skull form they should be classified as an 

 Asiatic rather than an American race. 



It is not unlikely that eventually the Eskim.o skull form also will 

 prove to have Asiatic affinities. In recent years Debets and other Rus- 

 sian antlu'opologists have described a long-headed population from 

 the Neolithic sites around Lake Baikal, sites which, as we have seen, 

 contain cultural material closely resembling that of the earliest known 

 Eskimos. In 1939 Hrdlicka studied these Siberian skulls and 

 described them as closely related to the xVmerican Indian (1942). He 

 does not bring the Eskimo into the comparison, but it is to be noted 

 that while the majority of the 33 Siberian male skulls are quite low- 

 vaulted, 8 of them are almost as high as the very high-vaulted Birnirk 

 crania. These eight skulls are likewise above the average in length, 

 and some of them are described as having keel-shaped vaults and nar- 

 row noses, features suggestive of the Eskimo. Until photographs and 

 a fuller description of the Siberian crania are available the significance 

 of these resemblances must remain in doubt. The present evidence 

 suggests, however, that these early Siberians, whose culture was un- 

 doubtedly related to that of the earliest Eskimos, included as a minor- 

 ity element a physical type corresponding rather closely to that of the 

 Eskimo. 



The thickened tympanic plate and the mandibular and palatine tori 

 also occur more frequently in Eurasia than in America. The tori are 

 found most often among the Chinese and Japanese (mostly prehis- 

 toric), the Ainu, Ostiak, Lapp, and Scandinavians of the Viking pe- 

 riod. The thickened tympanic plate occurs with less regularity among 

 the Mongoloid groups but shows a high incidence again in iron-age and 

 Medieval Norse crania from Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. Two 



