[LIGHTH ALL] SIGNPOSTS OF PREHISTORIC TIME 479 
This curious ceremonial usage of making a wry face and sticking 
out the tongue on one side, is of similar great antiquity to thatof dropping 
the bright offering into the root-hole. It is frequent on Iroquoian 
masks. It appears on a British Columbian West Coast mask in my 
possession. And I have observed it even in a Swiss mask in the 
National Museum at Zurich, apparently derived from some remnant 
of the Lake Dwellers remaining in the hills. Europe, a few thousand 
years ago, was racially merely an extension of Asia. The nomadic 
Mongoloid tribes found no difficulty in passing the low Ural hills, and 
ranging far into the West, as we know from the incursions of the 
Huns, the Golden Horde, the Bulgars and other movements, and 
the customs of the Lapps and Finns, Ugric peoples, with their wigwams 
and sweat-baths, and other signs of far cousinship with the Kamtskat- 
chkan Tchuktchis or ‘‘Indians of Siberia’”” and the American Indians. 
Masks were used very widely in sacred dances, and were in fact 
regarded as endowed with mystic life, on the same principle as idols. 
That principle was that if you made a shape, a corresponding spirit 
enters it. But if the general connection of Iroquoian masks with 
Asiatic mask usages be obviously of vast antiquity, are we not ready 
to find a relatively long and more specialized and traceable age, in 
this distinctive wry-face-and-tongue form of them which unites in 
one history the Iroquois, the Maori, and that early Swiss folk? If the 
Maori having it had still scarcely moved five hundred years ago, and 
had been in Samoa say a thousand years previously, and the Iroquois 
had moved but little two thousand years ago, and that Swiss element 
had probably not migrated at all within say five thousand years, (I 
am merely using rough illustrative periods) how many thousand years 
beyond that again must we go back to find the common sacred dance 
at which their common forefathers were present and saw this rite for 
the first time? Will less than twenty thousand years compass this 
little link in anthropologic time ? 
Again, some light on those great datemarks, the migrations to 
America, ought to be derivable from studies of the indispensable con- 
ditions for crossing the Pacific, and particularly the stages of de- 
velopment of navigation. Savages in canoes came first the easiest 
way—by the Aleutians or Behring Straits. The first of them were 
the northernmost canoemen, the Eskimo, or some pre-Eskimo Neo- 
lithics. On the other hand, advents by the Japan current pre- 
suppose large vessels, of sufficient size to survive a long voyage. The 
study of shipbuilding in Egypt and along the coasts of Southern Asia, 
with the connected civilizations, apparently contain the clues to the 
Central American civilizations. 
