THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF THE ESKIMO COLLINS 457 



Siberian and Permian art. Other Ipiutak features suggest Chinese 

 influence : masklike ivory carvings, long ivory rods resembling back 

 scratchers with one end carved to represent a human hand, and ivory 

 eyes, nose plugs, and mouth covers found with burials (Larsen and 

 Rainey, 1948, pis. 49, 54, 55, 73, 98) . 



Features such as these suggest that probably in the first millennium 

 B. C, or later, long after the rise of civilization in China, the Eskimos 

 at Bering Strait received strong cultural impulses from interior and 

 eastern Asia. If we visualize the early Baikal Neolithic as the tap- 

 root we can imagine these later Asiatic influences as forming a lateral 

 branch which, rooted in the richer and more diversified cultural en- 

 vironment of a later time, contributed its important part to the 

 synthesis of Eskimo culture. 



CONCLUSION 



On theoretical grounds we are forced to assume that the Indians 

 as well as the Eskimos reached America by way of Bering Strait. 

 Until recently there had been no direct evidence for this assumption 

 as no remains other than Eskimo had been found there. Probably, 

 in the centuries before Eskimo culture had crystallized and estab- 

 lished itself in northeast Siberia, some Neolithic groups crossed the 

 Strait by boat or on the ice and penetrated south and east into North 

 America. The presence of Indianlike skulls in the Siberian Neolithic 

 and of Old World culture traits such as stone gouges and comb- 

 stamped pottery in the inland and eastern areas of North America, 

 makes this a distinct possibility. Gjessing (1914) is probably cor- 

 rect in viewing gouges, comb-stamped pottery, and possibly certain 

 kinds of petroglyphs as part of a culture wave which, avoiding the 

 Arctic coast, spread from the inland regions of Eurasia to the interior 

 of North America. Such traits could have passed over at Bering 

 Strait without having become firmly established there, and hence 

 would have left no trace, or they may have left signs of their passage 

 that have not yet been discovered. 



Cultural connections of this kind, which are indicated by discon- 

 tinuous distribution of traits in the Old World and America, and 

 which have no demonstrable connection with the Eskimo problem, are 

 not within the scope of the present paper. Nor is there any point in 

 speculating on still earlier migrations that brought the first human 

 inhabitants to this continent, presumably not across ice or water but 

 over the great land bridge which in Pleistocene and early postglacial 

 times stretched for 1,000 miles from southern Bering Sea north into 

 the Arctic Ocean. 



The oldest cultural remains thus far found in the Bering Sea region 

 are those of the Denbigh Flint Complex, a microlithic culture dis- 

 covered in 1948 by J. L. Giddings, Jr., at Cape Denbigh, Norton 



