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where in America, but so strongly reminiscent of Polynesian myths 
that Kroeber declares “ either an Oceanic influence or an extraordin- 
ary coincidence has occurred.”^ If we go further, and, following the 
guidance of some enthusiasts, allow our imaginations to run amok, 
we may see the trunks of Indian elephants carved on Mayan monu- 
ments, and derive the calendrical system of the Mayas and the begin- 
nings of agriculture in America through Malaysia and southeastern 
Asia from a hypothetical source in ancient Egypt. But we need 
hardly resort to such far-fetched flights of fancy to sustain the theory 
of a trans-Pacific migration when so many more obvious parallels 
lie ready to our hand. 
Such a migration, nevertheless, is far from proved. There is no 
evidence that the Polynesians reached the open Pacific before the 
middle of the first millenium A.D., and archaeologists have found no 
traces of earlier inhabitants in the South Sea islands. The Poly- 
nesians doubtless drove or carried some Melanesians into the eastern 
Pacific, but that these Alelanesians could have introduced into 
America, between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries, all the wide- 
spread innovations attributed to them (for most of the parallels are 
with Melanesia rather than with Polynesia) seems highly improbable. 
We can hardly believe that the isolated Beaver Indians, for example, 
who had little or no contact with tribes south or west of Peace river, 
severed a finger in imitation of immigrants who landed less than a 
thousand years before somewhere on the coast of California or farther 
south, and then lost their identity amid a host of alien tribes. It is 
far more probable that the custom arose independently in America, 
where it has a very wide distribution, or else that the ancestors of our 
Indian tribes brought it from the Old World ages before the Poly- 
nesians began their wanderings over the Pacific ocean. Some of the 
other oft-cited parallels, such as the use of shell-money, of the blow- 
gun, and of feather head-dresses and cloaks, may be cases of conver- 
gent evolution, since they are not so complex that the human mind 
could not have evolved them independently in several different places. 
Certain correspondences, too, may be more apparent than real. Thus, 
the chief resemblance between the house-posts and totem-poles of 
British Columbia and the house-posts of the New Zealand Maoris lies 
1 Kroeber, A. L. : “Native Cultures of the Sou t Invest ; University of California Publications in 
Am. Archeology and Ethnology, vol, 23, No. 19, p. 397 (Berkeley, California, 1928). 
