There is no agreement as to the racial affinities of the earliest
migrants. Most anthropologists still believe they were Mongoloids and
therefore what they call Indians. Some go to the other extreme and
declare they were Australoid, Negroid, and/or Caucasoid. Some, like
Hooton, say the stock was drawn from a mingling of the three races in
Asia. He thinks they “may have received some Mongoloid admixture before
reaching the New World, but this is doubtful.”[3]
Many of the skulls of early man resemble in certain respects those of
that late arrival, the Eskimo, just as the Eskimo resembles some
specimens of Magdalenian man. The skulls of the Eskimo are long-headed,
and have keeled vaults and prominent cheekbones. But most early craniums
have three features that are lacking in the Eskimo—receding chins,
slanting foreheads and heavy brow ridges—all stigmata of the
Australoid-Melanesian.
It is rather puzzling to note that these early skulls are found with the
bones of extinct animals in South America, but seldom with such fossils
in North America, while they are not found with Folsom or Sandia or any
form of ancient point. (There seem few points of definite-early type in
South America.) It is possible, as Howard suggested, that the North
American hunters practiced exposure of the dead instead of burial, while
early man to the south left more burials for us than the few that have
been found.
The Puzzle of the Querns
The next puzzle lies in the milling stones. Man in America not only
starts off with an exceptionally fine type of spear point to thrust into
elephant or bison, and uses pressure flaking far more extensively than
man in the Old World; in addition, he develops the type of milling
stone, or quern, that does not appear in Europe until man is coming out
of the Old Stone Age and entering the neolithic period of agriculture.
Milling stones might be used as an argument against the early appearance
of man in America if it could be proved that they were made to grind
agricultural products; but no kernels of corn or other cultivated seeds
have been found with these querns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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