Linguistically the Zuñi Indians of today stand alone, unrelated, so far as has heretofore been determined, to any other Indians either sedentary, like themselves, or unsettled, like the less advanced peoples of the plains. Nevertheless, although they as yet thus constitute a single linguistic stock, there are present and persistent among them two distinct types of physique and numerous survivals--inherited, not borrowed--of the arts, customs, myths, and institutions of at least two peoples, unrelated at first, or else separate and very diversely conditioned for so long a period of their preunited history that their development had progressed unequally and along quite different lines, at the time of their final coalition. That thus the Zuñis are actually descendants of two or more peoples, and the heirs of two cultures at least, is well shown in their legends of ruins and olden times, and especially in these myths of creation and migration as interpreted by archeologic and ethnographic research. According to all these tokens and evidences, one branch of their ancestral people was, as compared with the other, aboriginal in the region comprising the present Zuñi country and extending far toward the north, whence at some remoter time they had descended. The other branch was intrusive, from the west or southwest, the country of the lower Rio Colorado, their earliest habitat not so clearly defined and their remoter derivation enigmatical, for they were much more given to wandering, less advanced in the peaceful arts, and their earliest ruins are those of comparatively rude and simple structures, hence scant and difficult to trace, at least beyond the western borders of Arizona. Considering both of these primary or parental stocks of the Zuñi as having been thus so widely asunder at first, the ancestral relations of the aboriginal or northern branch probably ranged the plains north of the arid mountain region of Utah and Colorado ere they sought refuge in the desert and canyons of these territories. Yet others of their descendants, if still surviving, may not unlikely be traced among not only other Pueblos, but also and more distinctly among wilder and remoter branches, probably of the Shoshonean stock. The ancestral relations of the intrusive or western branch, however, were a people resembling the semisettled Yumans and Pimans in mode of life, their ruins combining types of structure characteristic of both these stocks; and if their descendants, other than Zuñis themselves, be yet identified among Yuman tribes, or some like people of the lower Colorado region, they will be found (such of them as survive) not greatly changed, probably, from the condition they were all in when, at a very distant time, their eastward faring kinsfolk, who ultimately became Zuñis, left them there.