NORTH AMERICA 4
Australoid, Folsom, Algonquin, Eskimo
SOUTH AMERICA 1
Australoid
_No Discoveries No Inventions No Mongoloids_
By 300 B.C.—two hundred years after the Eskimo—Gladwin is willing to add
1 run to the North American score and make that run Mongoloid. But he
does not believe that the Mongoloids reached South America in any
numbers, or contributed anything but labor to the culture which Columbus
found. They did not make black-on-white pottery in the Pueblo country or
red-on-buff pottery and irrigation canals in southern Arizona, create
incised pottery, pyramids, carved jade, or a calendar system and
hieroglyphs in Middle America, pound bark cloth in Central America, or
produce stone fortresses and superb weaving and portrait jugs in Peru.
Left to their own devices, the Mongoloids would have accomplished no
more in the New World than they had in the Old before the Huns made
things unpleasant for them in northern China. Gladwin believes that the
people who created the culture of Middle America and Peru came overseas,
spreading north and south from the isthmus of Panama. The suggested
invasion by water explains the odd fact that many of the traits of
northern North America are like some of those of southern South America,
and not at all like most of the traits of the area between. Some of
these northern and southern traits, says Gladwin, are the property of
the Australoids who came far back; others in North America find
analogies in China and northern Asia. His overseas peoples thrust
themselves and their culture into the central part of the New World,
changing or obliterating the Australoid traits that they found there,
and isolating those that lay to the north and south. He believes that
these people brought with them certain objects and customs from the
islands in the Pacific, from southeastern Asia, and from China and
points west. Among them is the habit of squeezing a baby’s head between
boards to give it an elegant elongation; this head deformation is not
practiced in northern Asia, from which the Indians are presumed to have
come.
It is hardly necessary to point out that Gladwin’s hypothesis disposes
of the question: “Why are there no traces of Middle American and
Peruvian traits on the trail down from Alaska?” But we might ask: “Why
are there not more of them in the Pacific islands?”
Gladwin has not worked out his maritime invasions too thoroughly; but he
sees the Melanesians—who, he believed, reached Easter Island—continuing
on to Central America and becoming the Caribs and spreading into South
America and the West Indies. He sees the Polynesians taking much the
same route and turning into the Arawaks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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