VI. PROBLEMS OF MIGRATION 



HAVING adopted the view that America received its initial 

 popidations from Asia, the problems of migration present 

 themselves for consideration. These problems are numerous 

 and must be discussed in the main theoreticall3\ They call for in- 

 quiries into the location and extent of the cradle of the race; the 

 agencies and processes of dispersal; the period or periods of arrival 

 at the gateway or gateways to the New World ; the continental rela- 

 tions at and subsequent to the period of arrival or arrivals; the con- 

 dition of the connecting bridges and intervening waters ; the climate; 

 and the distribution of the peoples throughout America at all periods 

 down to the arrival of Europeans. Some of these problems are not 

 susceptible of solution while others must always remain in a large 

 measure mere matters of speculation. 



The widespread dispersal of the genus Homo over Europe in 

 Pleistocene time is an accepted fact. Osseous traces of his presence 

 are found associated with geological formations of this period from 

 the Mediterranean to the North Sea and from the Atlantic to the 

 Black Sea. His remains are associated with those of extinct species 

 of animals, including the mastodon and mammoth, whose distribu- 

 tion was still wider, and we are asked whether it is not reasonable 

 to suppose that man should have spread with these creatures during 

 periods of mild climate as far north as the Arctic Circle and why 

 he should not have followed them into the New World by the 

 Bering land route, which is believed to have been more or less 

 permanently open. That this could have happened and that it 

 probably did happen are taken for granted by supporters of the 

 hypothesis of the very early occupancy of the American Continent. 

 Howsoever plausible this view may appear, it may be claimed with 

 confidence that up to the present time the Bering region, and indeed 

 the far north generally, have furnished no evidence of the early 

 presence of man on the continent, and that the testimony obtained 

 in more southern areas and outlined elsewhere in these pages, as in 

 California, Idaho, Nevada, Brazil, and Argentina, giving man and his 

 possible predecessors a place m Tertiary and early Quaternary times, 



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