The first Mongoloids, as Gladwin sees it, were the Eskimos. They came to
the northern edge of North America about 500 B.C. But, because they
clung to that edge, we must look elsewhere and later for a Mongoloid
invasion of the cultural areas of the New World.
Gladwin believes that these second Mongoloids were thrust out of
northern China and on into the New World by the ferment of the Huns.
They reached Alaska about 300 B.C. Ultimately, supplemented by the
Uto-Aztecans, they supplied the man power on which the Mexican and Maya
civilizations were built; and some reached the west coast of South
America.[30] Without a good many of them it seems to us difficult to
account for such Andean peoples as the speakers of the Quechua and
Aymara languages, who were the working population of the Chimu, Nasca,
Tiahuanaco, and Inca cultures. By Gladwin’s dating, the Mongoloids had
only a little more than a thousand years to stamp their hair and eyes
and teeth upon five million to fifty million men and women in both
Americas.
By the time of the Algonquin—let alone the Eskimo and the Aztec—we are
far out of the era of early man. But we are not yet through with the
theories of Gladwin as to the peopling of the Americas; for, not content
with the stimulating activities of the Huns in northern China, he
rediscovers the sailors and the Asiatic fleet of the late, great
conqueror Alexander of Macedon, and leads them on expeditions through
the East Indies and Oceania even to the Gulf of Darien.[31]
However heretical Gladwin’s suggestions may be, they deserve serious
attention if only because they bear heavily upon an old quarrel of the
archaeologists, and because this old quarrel bears upon the antiquity of
man in the Americas. To be sure, it has to do with the Indians who made
the civilizations of Middle America and Peru two thousand years ago, and
not with the earlier men who did no more than hunt or gather, and who
made nothing more remarkable than Folsom and Eden points or milling
stones. But by studying certain aspects of those civilizations we may
recognize that the Indians had been in the Americas 3,000 to 5,000 years
before Columbus. By so much we may reenforce the theory that their
forerunners or their forebears came to the New World at least 15,000
years ago and probably 25,000 or more years ago.
Siberian Caucasoids
Since 1950, Joseph Birdsell and Carleton Coon have done something to
clear a little of the mist that has obscured the physical origins of man
in the New World. They agree, more or less, that the first migrants were
of Caucasoid stock from the basin of the Amur River, in northeast
Siberia.[32]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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