243 
ous examination. After all. wliatever conclusion we may reach will 
not seriously affect the problem of the orip;in of our aborigines, or the 
route by which they entered America; for the vast majority of the 
Indians are certainly not of Melanesian extraction, but of Mongoloid, 
and indubitably occupied America thousands of years before the 
Christian era. 
The north Pacific, up to 51 degrees north latitude, was a more 
formidable barrier to migration than the south, because there were 
no chains of islands to serve as slciiping stones from one hemisphere 
to the other. Within tlie last two centuries some fishing junks carried 
by the Japanese current have occasionally drifted across to this side, 
and a few of their occupants, always men only, have survived the 
exposure and privation.^ But these occurrences have been rare, and 
there is no proof that survivors would have escaped massacre in pre- 
historic times. The cultures of tlie British Columbian and Alaskan 
natives reveal no traces of Japanese or Chinese influences, although 
they liave many links with the native cultures of northeast Siberia. 
We can, therefore, safely reject the possibility of a direct migration 
by sea from eastern Asia to America, for which it woidd Im difficult 
to discover any suiiporting evidence. 
There remain, then, only two routes, one by sea from Kams- 
chatka to the Aleutian islands and thence to the mainland of America, 
the other across Bering strait. Both have numerous advocates, the 
former in Europe ratlier than in America, whose scholars appreciate 
more fully, perhajis, the dangers of navigation in the stormy and fog- 
ridden Bering sea. Xo one can assert that it is impossible for small, 
open l)oats to make the three hundred mile traverse from tlie Koman- 
dorski islands off Kamschatka to Attu, the westernmost island of the 
Aleutian chain, but the feasibility of a migralion, or series of migra- 
tions, along this route seems exceedingly doubtful. Jochelson’s failure 
to find any early Indian remains in the Aleutian shell-heaps and 
village-sites, any culture different from that of tlie present islanders 
before their contact with the Russians,- is another strong argument 
against this route; for no one doubts that the islanders themselves 
reached their present home from the mainland of America, not from 
Kamschatka. 
1 C/. Brooks, C W. : "Report, of Japancsn Vo.s.srls Wrecked in the North Pacific Ocean, from the 
Earliest Records to the Present Time’’; Proc., Cal. Acad. Sci., vol. vi, 1875, pp. 50-66 (San FrancLsco, 
1876). 
- .lochclson, W. : Arclia'oloaical Tnvestisations in the Aleutian Islands’’; The Carnegie Institute of 
Washington, Pub. No. 367 (Washington, 1925). 
