468 ANNUAL, REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 35 



six fairly distinct physical types of the Indian. These types naturally 

 must have developed somewhere, and this may as well have 

 been in America as elsewhere ; but their characteristics, distril)ution, 

 and stability all speak for an old differentiation, which, in some 

 cases at least, must have been, it seems, pre-American. The remains 

 in Alaska, nearest the source, show no such homogeneity as would 

 accord with the conception of a unique original type. From the 

 point of view of physical anthropology we are steadily becoming 

 more convinced that the comers from Asia, though all of one large 

 human stem, the yellow-brown, brought with them already con- 

 siderable physical heterogeneity; and if this is true of physical 

 characteristics, it is certainly true also of languages and culture. 

 These are no speculations or theories but results of clearer insight 

 into these matters arising from the results of the late explorations 

 and accumulating materials. 



These explorations shed also a direct and remarkable light on the 

 question of what the Asiatic man brought with him culturally. 



Up to very recently there prevailed among American scholars the 

 notion that the American cultures were of essentially or even wholly 

 American development. This would imply that the comers from 

 Asia brought with them but a sort of undifferentiated simple culture 

 on the basis of which the American developments took place ; or that 

 if they brought any specializations, these were forgotten under the 

 new environment. The answers to this from our excavations are that 

 the farthest Northwest, in as far as we can reach, is culturally rich and 

 varied; that the oldest of the cultures there discovered, namely, the 

 fossil-ivory culture of northern Bering Sea and of the northeastern 

 Asiatic coasts, and the old culture of Kodiak Island, are not only thei 

 richest in forms that are the most beautiful as well as conventional- 

 ized, but that they come in full-fledged and that their outstanding 

 features may be followed deep into the American Continent; while 

 other cultural evidences are appearing that connect directly on 

 one hand with the neolithic attainments of Asia and on the other 

 hand with numerous elements in the cultures of the northwest coast 

 and farther southward, in the Southwest, Mexico, and even Cen- 

 tral South America. These are no introductions into Alaska from 

 the American side, for the oldest and best antedate the continental 

 differentiations. They evidently appear initially in the north and 

 were brought from Asia, where they must have had a long period of 

 development. The cultural evidence of the late explorations shows, 

 therefore, that the men from Asia were coming over not as a people 

 without a culture, but already as carriers of well-advanced cultures 

 of, in substance, the American type, and from which further Ameri- 



