Other things suggest a long sojourn for the Indian in the New World.
Consider the matter of language—“the archives of history.” The Indian,
writes N. C. Nelson, “had been at home in the New World long enough to
have evolved about 160 linguistic stocks or language families, with
1,200 or more dialectic subdivisions.”[2] Alfred L. Kroeber says that
North and South America “contain more native language families than all
the remainder of the world.”[3] Some of this diversity could be due to
migrations from different linguistic areas of the Old World. It might
also be accounted for by the theory of Franz Boas that among early
primitive peoples there was great diversity of language, and that single
tongues began to spread widely only when conquering and proselyting
groups won a certain amount of power and dominion.[4] John Harrington,
an American linguistic authority, believes that the diversity of Indian
speech argues a very long residence in the New World—“at least 20,000
years, perhaps three times that.”[5] Edgar B. Howard states:
“Considering that the languages of the New World lack evidence, outside
of Eskimo, of any identification with Old World languages, the
conclusion appears to be that human contact between the two continents
was very remote.”[6] If there is no such identification, then even the
last migrants came at a very early date indeed, or else all the tribal
relatives who were left behind in the Old World perished without
linguistic trace. It is possible, of course, that resemblances have
merely not been recognized.
In addition to differentiation of language, there is differentiation of
physique. When we in the United States think of the Indian, we think of
a tall man with high cheekbones, a hawk-nose, and a bronze-red skin.
Actually the American Indian is probably more varied in height, face,
and color than the whole White racial stock.[7] More than that, his
somatic constitution—the inner man in a physical sense—varies greatly.
By 1492 the Indian had adapted himself to eight different climates from
arctic to tropic, from arid to humid, from sea level to the 14,000-foot
heights of Peru. This would take time, much time. Albrecht Penck, the
great European glacialist, thinks 25,000 years hardly long enough.[8]
The civilizations which the Indian developed in the Americas—the Maya,
Aztec, and Inca cultures—provide another test of how long man had been
in the New World before Columbus came. This test is no more exact than
those we have already mentioned, but it suggests quite a long sojourn.
From the Old Stone Age to the New
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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