THE COMING OF MAN FEOM ASIA IN THE 

 LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERIES ' 



By Ale§ HrdliC'Ka 

 United States National Museum 



[With 1 plate] 



The chief deduction of American anthropology, in the substance 

 of which all serious students concur, is that this continent was peo- 

 pled essentially from northeastern Asia. The deduction is based on 

 the facts that man could not have originated in the New World, and 

 hence must have come from the Old; that the American aborigines 

 are throughout of one fundamental race, the nearest relatives of 

 which exist to this day over wide parts of northern and eastern 

 Asia ; and that the only practicable route for man in such a cultural 

 stage as he must have been in at the time of his first coming to 

 America was that between northeastern Asia and Alaska. 



The principle of the problem being thus settled, there remained 

 the important details of when and just how man came to America; 

 what he brought with him in the way of language, culture, and 

 physique; how he proceeded in peopling the new continent after he 

 had reached it; and what were the genetic relations of the Eskimo 

 and the Indian. 



On all these large questions new light has been shed by recent 

 explorations in the far Northwest under the auspices of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution. Initiated by the author in 1926, these explora- 

 tions have now been carried on in Alaska for 9 years, and in some 

 years by two separate parties. They comprise systematic work both 

 in physical anthropology and in archeology and have reached over 

 nearly the whole of the western coasts, from Point Barrow to Kodiak 

 Island, and over the principal islands of Bering Sea. They resulted 

 in the location of a large number of old sites of habitation, in the 

 collection of valuable skeletal materials from the entire region, in 

 the obtaining of anthropometric data on the full-blood remnants of 

 the living populations, and in the unearthing of unsuspected rich 



* Reprinted with revisions (bringing article up to date) by permission from the Pro- 

 ceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 71, no. 6, 1932. 



463 



