Chapter VIII: Preface (7)

Briefly, then, my present opinion as to the peopling of the American
continent is as follows: At a rather remote period, probably soon
after the last glacial retreat, there straggled into the New World
from Asia by way of the Bering Strait groups of dolichocephals in
which were blended at least three strains: one very closely allied to
the fundamental brunet European and African long-headed stock called
“Mediterranean”; another, a more primitive form with heavy
brow-ridges, low broad face and wide nose, which is probably to be
identified with an archaic type represented today very strongly
(although mixed with other elements) in the native Australians, and
less strongly in the so-called “Pre-Dravidians” such as the Veddahs,
and also in the Ainu; thirdly, an element certainly Negroid (not
Negro). These people, already racially mixed, spread over the New
World carrying with them a primitive fishing and hunting culture.
Their coming must have preceded the occupation of eastern Asia by the
present predominantly Mongoloid peoples, since the purer types of
these dolichocephals do not show the characteristic Mongoloid
features.

At a somewhat later period there began to arrive in the New World
groups of Mongoloids coming by the same route as their predecessors.
Many of these were probably purely Mongoloid in race, but others were
mixed with some other racial element notable because of its
high-bridged and often convex nose. This may have been either Armenoid
or Proto-Nordic (or neither one). These later invaders were capable of
higher cultural development than the early pioneers and were
responsible for the development of agriculture and for the notable
achievements of the New World civilization. In some places they may
have driven out and supplanted the early long-heads, but often they
seem to have interbred with them producing the multiple and varied
types of the present American Indians—types which are Mongoloid to a
varying extent, but never purely Mongoloid. Last of all came the
Eskimo, a culturally primitive Mongoloid group, already mixed with
some non-Mongoloid strain before their arrival in North America.[5]

In 1947 Hooton stated this in simpler terms: “I am fairly sure that the earliest arrivals here were non-Mongoloids carrying archaic White strains (‘Australoids,’ if you like) probably mixed with Negritic elements and with whatever else was kicking around in Asia before they crossed Bering Strait.”[6]

Dixon’s position, which he took in 1923, is in some ways a more radical one than Hooton’s. He introduces “Proto-Australoid,” “Proto-Negroid,” and Mediterranean elements, and also Caspian and Alpine; but, where Hooton recognizes a general stock in which Australoid, Negroid, and Mediterranean were blended before their arrival, Dixon brings in his races separate and pure, and he assigns them definite areas in the New World.

Dixon’s Proto-Australoid originated in tropical southeast Asia. It spread westward “through India and the Arabian coasts to Africa, and by way of the Mediterranean passed into western Europe, where it appeared in early Paleolithic times.... Another branch spread southeast into Australia, where its early presence is proved by the Talgai skull,” perhaps 150,000 years old. “A third branch drifted slowly northward up the eastern Asiatic littoral, and, crossing into America, spread thinly through the continents, and perhaps mainly along the western shores.... On the Pacific Coast in California and Lower California it appears to constitute the oldest stratum, characterizing as it does the crania from the lower layers of the shell-heaps, from the islands of Santa Catalina and San Clemente off the Coast, and from the extinct Pericue [now Pericú] isolated on the southern tip of the peninsula of Lower California.” Dixon places some of his Proto-Australoids among the ancestors of the Iroquois and the southern Algonquin tribes of the East. He puts most of his Proto-Negroids in that same eastern area and with the same tribes. He finds them generally east of the Rockies, but also among the Basket Makers in the Southwest and the peoples of the Coahuila Caves of northern Mexico, in the Lagoa Santa area in Brazil, and in Patagonia.[7]

Two of the White types—the Caspian and the Mediterranean—seem rather scattered and rather early. Dixon thinks that a Caspian strain may have appeared as soon as the Proto-Australoid, perhaps sooner. It crops up among the Eskimo and at spots in British Columbia, and widely in South America. The Mediterranean influence, Dixon says, is found also among the Eskimo and among Shoshonean and Siouan tribes.

Dixon does not think much of the Mongoloids. Believing they were a very old people that drifted into Europe in early paleolithic times, he says they “contributed little of value either to the sum of human achievements or the blood of existing races.” He gives them only scant space in North America. Instead he introduces two other round-headed peoples. They are first the Paleo-Alpines, and later the Alpines. These, who seem to take on the role played by the Mongoloids of Hooton and others, spread through to South America and “displayed striking ability.... To them seems to be attributable most of the higher achievements of the aboriginal American peoples.”[8]

Some theories are doubtless much too simple; also, they depend too much on other theories, such as the idea that all the races originated in southwestern Asia. R. Ruggles Gates, who writes of “American Neanderthaloids” and “pseudo-Australoids,” believes that the craniums of the men of Lagoa Santa and Punin—“the earliest wave of interglacial Americans”—“represent a parallel stage in skull development of a widely different race” from the one that began as the Neanderthal or the one that ended as the Australian.[9]

A Potpourri of Races

The theories of Dixon and Hooton and others conflict in many places; but they present, on the whole, an arresting and convincing case for early man as a predecessor of the Mongoloids and as quite a different sort of creature. There are many side issues to the general theory, and they increase as we begin to deal with living peoples. Hooton finds close resemblances to Egyptian skulls among the Arizona Basket Makers and in the Coahuila Caves of northern Mexico,[10] and Dixon identifies ancient Egyptian skulls with skulls from California and skulls of the Iroquois. W. W. Howells sees similarities between “many forest tribes of South America and certain Indonesian groups in Borneo and the Philippines,” and believes the non-Mongoloid features of the Indians point, “not to the Australoids or the Negroes, but towards the White group.”[11] Hooton finds Indians of the Northwest coast who “resemble Alpine Europeans.” He says that certain Plains Indians seem to be basically White with Mongoloid added, and he points out that although the Eskimo are the most Mongoloid of all the inhabitants of the Americas, they are long-headed, which is a most un-Monogoloid trait.[12] On the basis of skulls from Chancelade, France, and certain late-paleolithic traits, Sollas saw the ancestors of the Eskimo living in Europe in Magdalenian times.[13] M. R. Harrington also picks a Magdalenian forebear for the Eskimo.[14] Authorities differ as to whether the Botocudo tribe of Brazil is descended from the people that left their skulls in the Lagoa Santa caves, but on the basis of R. N. Wegners description of a Bolivian tribe, the Qurunga, Griffith Taylor believes these people may be living representatives of an early Australoid migration.[15] Hooton puts forward the picturesque and amusing theory that the Maya, with their large, curved noses and their mania for flattening their heads between boards, picked up both the nose and the mania from the Armenoids of the Iranian plateau. The Mongoloids provided the characteristic skin, hair, and eyelids.[16]

The backwardness of certain living American tribes suggests to Sauer that they came to the New World a very long time ago. Their lack of a number of useful skills argues that they branched off from the men of the Old Stone Age when the Australoid ancestors of the abysmal Blackfellows of Australia looked like an up-and-coming people. These early men had the enterprise to reach the New World, but they stuck to old and limited habits of life. They would not learn from new invading peoples, and so they were forced into refuge areas as remote as Newfoundland, Lower California, Amazonia, and Tierra del Fuego. As an example of cultural backwardness and of an inability to learn which recalls the Australians, Sauer cites a people in the Brazilian interior who get along without boiling any of their food. He believes that this tribe acquired its cultural habits in the days before man began to put heated stones into water in pitch-sealed baskets. The primitive resistance of these “Indians” to borrowing new cooking skills like boiling comes out in other directions. “Long in contact with pottery-making peoples, they make casual or no use of pots, but restrict their cooking to roasting and baking, with gourds, a late acquisition, used for carrying water.”[17]

Griffith Taylor once wrote to Earl W. Count that, because certain of the now extinct mammals inhabited both sides of Bering Strait in the days of the glaciers, “it is almost impossible that the Australoids (who preyed on them) did not cross into America in Pre-Würm times.” Count supports Taylor with the suggestion that the most primitive of the many stocks that invaded the Americas came “at a time, say, when Talgai man and Wadjak man were en route to their _cul de sac_ in Australia.”[18]

Radical as these last two suggestions are in point of time, they are conservative compared with theories held by A. A. Mendes Correâ and Paul Rivet. Like many another student, Mendes Correâ saw Australian, Caucasoid, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Asiatic affinities among the American Indians; but he struck into a new field of theory in 1926 by transporting the Australians to South America over a now-vanished land-bridge to the south. Using Wegener’s hypothesis of the drift of continents, he found his bridge in a severed and displaced Antarctica. He conceded that this was only a conjecture, but thought it “very probable.”[19] That same year Rivet—approving migrations of Australian, Malayan-Polynesian, Asiatic, and Ural elements—suggested that glaciation in the southern hemisphere might have aided the Australians in passing from island to island until they reached the mainland of South America.[20] He dated their journey at only 6,000 years ago,[21] so that glacial assistance beyond the present extent of Antarctica seems just a little unlikely. Rivet, following many a student from Leibnitz to Thomas Jefferson, proposed to trace the origin of the American peoples through comparing their languages with those of the Old World. In 1925 he came up with something more than the usual random identities between words.[22] Indeed, the parallels which he drew between the present speech of the Tshon of Patagonia and the Australians seemed to Dixon to be impossibly close after centuries upon centuries of separation from one another and of contact with other peoples.[23] Only sheer coincidence could account for such identity.

There remain two champions of multiform and multitudinous migrations—José Imbelloni of Argentina and Harold S. Gladwin. They go further than any of their predecessors in peopling the New World with varied races, and further in advancing transpacific migrations as an important factor in the history of the Americas.

Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World?

Both Imbelloni and Gladwin begin with a suggestion that Pygmies deserve consideration. These primordial migrants trod their tiny paces from some unknown fatherland to the forests of the Congo and the jungles of New Guinea, to islands like the Andamans and possibly to Tasmania. The presence of five-foot Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego suggests to both Imbelloni and Gladwin that Pygmies may have preceded the Australoids to the New World. The advent of Pygmies in Tierra del Fuego as well as in Tasmania may be open to question; for in both places the natives, though short, exceeded the average of Pygmy height by a few inches, and their heads, instead of being round like those of the Pygmies, are recorded as of medium cephalic index.

After the Tasmanian strain, Imbelloni carries over by land a Melanesian type to lay their skulls in Lagoa Santa, Punin, Texas, and Lower California. Next came tall people, “comparable partly to the Australian type,” who seem to be the Indians of plains and pampas. These were the last of the land-borne migrants until the present era. Hereafter they came by sea. The fourth element was a Proto-Indonesian people that settled exclusively in South America and mainly in Amazonia. With the fifth group Imbelloni presents the first frank Mongoloids, round-headed and inclined to agriculture; they settled in the Southwest, in Middle America, and along the Andean coast. An almost identical people—whom Imbelloni calls the Isthmid—spread through the center of the same area shortly after the birth of Christ and brought to fruition the civilizations which Cortez and Pizarro found in the New World. To top off his list, Imbelloni brings over the Eskimo and men for the American Northwest—but by no longer a sea voyage than Bering Strait.[24]

Gladwin’s theories appeared first in the second volume of _Excavations at Snaketown_, and were presented in altered and amplified form through his rather antic book _Men Out of Asia_. They are completely heretical, completely fascinating, and in some respects uncommonly plausible. They are certainly a tonic.

Gladwin begins with what might be called a Pygmoid visitation. He does not dignify it with the word “migration.” He is careful to say that there are only “rather vague indications.” There is “just enough to make one wonder if there may not have been a few Pygmy groups who strayed over here long, long ago and were pushed off to the edges and the ends when the Australoid tide flowed in.”[25]

If a scientific study is ever made in the Guayana highlands of Venezuela, some support may be given to the theory of an early Pygmy migration. Carl Sauer on a visit to Venezuela in 1946 saw photographs of a Pygmy-like people taken by a Venezuelan army officer who had paddled and packed the Guayana River for some years. This tribe, which does not interbreed with other tribes, appears to be Pygmoid in stature and type. Further, it lacks “clothing, weaving, netting, baskets, boats, and fishing skills, and also houses.”[26]

Australoids, Negroids, and Men from Europe

Gladwin is definite about the Australoids. They came over Bering Strait somewhere around 25,000 years ago, and drifted down the west coast. They spread out in the southwestern part of the United States below a line from San Francisco to the Texas coast, and flowed on down into Mexico and South America. For evidence he has more than the Australoid-Melanesian skulls of Lower California, Texas, Punin, Paltacalo, and Lagoa Santa. He cites a number of things used and made by the Australians of recent times and also found in the area between southern California and eastern Texas. They include an Aurignacian flint industry, bunt points for darts, bull-roarers, string made by spinning human hair, twisted rabbit fur, curved throwing sticks with parallel grooves, sand paintings, amputation of finger joints as shown in pictographs, and similarities in spear-throwers and darts with foreshafts (see illustration, page 228).[27] We should like to find them nearer Lagoa Santa.

Gladwin’s next migration, the Proto-Negroid of Dixon, leans upon the Pseudo-Negroid traits of Hooton. It comes in about 17,000 years ago, also over Bering Strait, but down through the corridor between the retreating ice fields of western Canada. Having seen Aurignacian qualities in the Australoids, Gladwin sees Solutrean ones in the Negroid invaders. They bring—or, rather, make—the Folsom point. Unlike the Australoids, who were mostly food gatherers, the Negroids—or Folsom men—are primarily hunters. Although they come trickling in for many, many years, they are few; for, in spite of their hunting prowess and their fine flint knives and spear points, they never invade the Australoid territory that is staked out south from the Mexican border.[28]

_Implements from Australoid areas of the eastern hemisphere
resembling implements from western Texas. (After Gladwin, 1937.)_]

Bunt-Points
A, Melanesia; B, western Texas. (length of B—6 inches)
Bull-Roarers
A, Australia; B, western Texas. (length of B—16 inches)
Curved Throwing Sticks
A, Australia; B, western Texas. (length of A—26 inches)
Spear-Throwers
A, Australia; B, western Texas, (length of B—24 inches)

The next migration is the Algonquin. It reaches North America somewhere between 1000 and 500 B.C. These people bring in the cord-marked pottery of the Woodland culture of the eastern United States—unpolished and unpainted, its only ornament impressed in the clay. Such pottery has now been traced to western Canada, up into Alaska, across to Siberia, west through Russia to the beakerwares of Europe, and finally down into Africa about 3000 B.C. The Algonquins are such a mixture as the long trip of their pottery might indicate. They are generally long-headed, and they are not today wholly Mongoloid.[29]

No Mongoloids till 300 B.C.

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]

Birdsell, a close student of the Australian aborigines, finds three strains in these peoples, one of which is traceable to the “white” Ainus, of northern Japan, and finally to what he calls the Amurians of the aforementioned river basin. In Australia their descendants are rather short and stocky, with a “rough-hewn Caucasoid cast of features.” Their craniums are long and low, with large brow ridges—general traits of Pleistocene man as well as some of our possibly early, and certainly problematical, Americans. Coon supposes that natural selection among the Amurians—trapped by the advance of the fourth glaciation or one of its substages—produced certain Mongoloid features that they later carried into the New World. Birdsell sees among the early migrants no Negritos, no full-sized Negroids, no so-called Melanesians, no Mediterranean type of Caucasoids. He suggests that a much-mixed strain of Caucasoid Amurians and the newly evolved Mongoloid race accounts for earliest man in the Americas. These “present the only discernible elements available at the proper time and place to have contributed importantly to the New World populations.... One may speculate that if human populations reached the New World in the third interglacial they could be expected to be purely Caucasoid, that is Amurian, and to show no Mongoloid characteristics.” Birdsell suggests that migrants coming after the last glaciation would carry some Mongoloid features through hybridization. Guardedly, Birdsell insists that, though this is a satisfying and stimulating hypothesis, we have as yet no means of judging accurately racial affiliations from a single cranium or entire populations. He concludes—somewhat sadly, we surmise—that methods utilized as recently as 1949 (the date of his proposal) offer no promise of unraveling in detail the enigma of the origins of our earliest Americans.

10
DID THE INDIAN INVENT OR BORROW HIS CULTURE?

_American anthropologists usually deny that Old World cultures have
influenced to any great extent the pre-Columbian development of the
American Indian. We have set up for Aboriginal America a sort of_ ex
post facto _Monroe Doctrine and are inclined to regard suggestions of
alien influences as acts of aggression. This is probably a
scientifically tenable position, although I am afraid it has often
been maintained in part by an emotional bias—an “America for
Americans” feeling._
—EARNEST A. HOOTON

Diffusion vs. Independent Invention

We hope you have not been skipping the choice thoughts that we have placed at the beginning of chapters. Some of them are merely amusing, but certain ones make an important point. Such is the above remark from Hooton. It calls our attention to an unscientific emotionalism which often lies behind one of the dogmas of American archaeology.

This dogma is called the autochthonous origin of Indian cultures. It asserts that practically all the traits, discoveries, and inventions which Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro found in the New World were homegrown products—importations barred. The question at issue between the friends and the opponents of this dogma is commonly expressed as Independent Invention versus Diffusion. But the phrasing is not quite accurate: it needs a little amplification. Anything invented by man is in a sense an independent invention. In the present case we are talking of an invention made in one center, the New World, independent of a similar invention in another center, the Old. We are concerned, not with independent invention, but with _parallel_ independent invention. “Diffusion” is still more inaccurate. Normally it means the gradual transfer of some trait or technique from one people to another, often through the intervention of a third or of a third and a fourth people. In the present discussion it is more a matter of a people’s carrying the trait or the technique to a new home. The question is not merely, “Did the Indian invent pottery?” or “Did the American Australoid invent the bull-roarer?” It is rather, “Did he invent it in the New World or the Old?” or “Did he invent it in the Old World and carry it to the New?” or “Did he invent it in the New World while another fellow invented it in the Old?”

This problem of parallel independent invention versus diffusion is important to any discussion of early man, because it can also be phrased: “Did he or did he not bring traits from the Old World that may indicate his racial ancestry?”

_Among the most curious resemblances between traits in the New World
and in the Old are those of Panpipes. Certain pipes from the Solomon
Islands have been found to have the same scale and the same absolute
pitch as specimens from western Brazil. Double rows of pipes come
from the hinterland of Burma, from the Solomon Islands, and from
Panama and the Andean highlands, and in all these areas the two rows
are tuned in the same relation to each other. The two sets may be
lashed together, like these from the Solomon Islands, left, and from
Bolivia, right, or they may be merely connected by a cord and blown
by two men or, alternately, by one. (Left, after von Hornbostel,
1912; right, after Nordenskiöld, 1924.)_]

Both the theory of diffusion and the theory of parallel, independent invention arise from the same scientific fact. This fact is that different primitive peoples often make similar tools, build similar buildings, enjoy similar institutions, live by similar customs, or believe similar myths. And they do this although the tribes may be widely separated from one another. To pin the matter down to our own present concern, certain objects found in the New World and dated before Columbus are almost exactly like objects in the Old World. For instance, a spear-thrower from western Texas not only employs the same principle as one from Australia, but has practically the same physical shape. Curved throwing-sticks and bull-roarers come from both these localities (see illustration, page 226). Star-shaped mace heads of Melanesian type turn up in Peru. Looms that have the same eleven working parts are found in areas of the New World as well as the Old. Easter Island has polygonal stonework with locked joints which matches a form of masonry in Andean Peru, and a certain people of Easter Island stretched their ear lobes in the same fashion as the Incas. Panpipes of the Old World type appear in South America, Panama, and California; some from western Brazil are identical in tonal scale and absolute pitch with some from the Solomon Islands (see illustration, page 235). In Hawaii and in Peru, as in Egypt and ancient Japan, brothers married to sisters were of superior status. The digging stick of certain Polynesians has a step like that of the Indians of Peru. The quipu, or knotted-string record, spread from Polynesia to Peru, and the decimal system was found in both areas, though farther north, in Middle America, men employed the vigesimal system based on progression by twenties. The Hindu game of pachisi resembles the Mexican game of patolli. Lists have been published of as many as fifty such similarities between Oceania and the Americas.[1]

_Striking resemblances exist between Old World and New World
artifacts. The stone clubs are about 14 inches long. (Upper left,
after Gladwin, 1937; the Chinese bell, after Gladwin, 1937, the
Arizona bell, after Elmore, 1945; upper right, the New Zealand club,
after Wickersham, 1895, the California and Peruvian clubs, after
Imbelloni, 1930. The mace heads, after Gladwin, 1937.)_]

Effigy Flints
Russia
Illinois
Bronze and Copper Bells
China
Arizona
Two-Edged Stone Clubs
New Zealand
California
Peru
Star-Shaped Mace Head
Melanesia
Peru

Bastian’s “Psychic Unity”

Those who argue for independent invention rest their case largely on a distortion of the theory of “psychic unity” put forward by Adolf Bastian in mid-Victorian days. From studies of African and Asiatic cultures, Bastian developed the thesis that “psychic unity” everywhere produced similar “elementary ideas.” Thus early man in France and early man in Asia might harden the point of a wooden spear in a fire, or knock chips off a lump of flint to make a sharper tool, or make a rope out of twisted vines. But beyond “elementary ideas,” said Bastian, man would develop different things in different places, depending on different physical conditions; and finally, as he reached a higher plane of mental and social development, his ideas and his behavior would be influenced by other men and other cultures with which he came in contact. This was a sound thesis. Unfortunately, however, Bastian’s followers ignored the words “elementary ideas,” as well as the last half of his theory, and made “psychic unity” the provider of all good things from pots to pyramids.

There have been opponents of independent invention, of course. There were some in Bastian’s day. They pointed out—as Robert H. Lowie has done recently—that the champion of the theory must prove that different peoples making similar things were subjected to similar stimulants in both areas. Otherwise “all the societies of the world should share the features in question.”[2] Lowie might have said that all cultures of man should be alike today.

By and large, the diffusionists were in the minority. The distorters of Bastian triumphed. They triumphed even in the Old World, where distances were not always very great, and where traffic between Africa and Eurasia seemed not so very difficult. You can imagine, therefore, what a happy hunting ground the independent inventionists have made of the Americas. The New World is remote indeed from the Old. You must go back to the time of the glaciers to find a land-bridge and up to the Arctic to bring the two worlds within hailing distance of each other. Otherwise you must be willing to accept thousands of miles of ocean voyaging. The physical fact of the remoteness of the Americas has stopped many a mental adventurer among the anthropologists. He rereads with respect—perhaps too much respect—these words of Spinden’s: “The fact that no food plant is common to the two hemispheres is enough to offset any number of petty puzzles in arts and myths.”[3]

If the physical fact of the Pacific Ocean had not been enough to stifle talk of diffusion, the extravagant theories of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith would have done the job. Here was a diffusionist indeed! Echoed by W. J. Perry, Smith found the beginnings of all culture of any importance in Egypt, and from there he sent its traveling salesmen abroad to sell it to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Pearls and pyramids, gold and dolmens, initiations and totemism, sun worship and the marriage of brother and sister, mummies—even if they were no more than desiccated bodies wrapped in a bag—these traits and many more all “proved” that the Children of the Sun had sold their cultural goods to lesser peoples.

There were other theorists as wild and whirling. Augustus Le Plongeon brought the Maya from Atlantis to found Egypt. Ignatius Donnelly reversed the procession and dragged Greeks to Atlantis and then Mexico. Lewis Spence transported Atlas across the Atlantic as the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl. Leo Wiener, as Spinden has put it, “derives everything of importance in the New World from the highly civilized coasts of Gambia and Sierra Leone ... brightest Africa.”[4] And then there was Churchward with his continent of Mu.

Smiths and Perry’s uncritical use of evidence and their distortion of fact—plus these fantasies of Africa and Atlantis and Mu—put the friends of independent invention even more firmly in the saddle than the single and simple fact of the Pacific Ocean. The diffusion of Smith _et al._ was a diffusion to end all diffusion.

Americanists—students of man in the New World—have not yet escaped from the curse of the Children of the Sun, and the terror of Atlantis and Mu. One of the best, Baron Erland Nordenskiöld, a distinguished Swedish scientist, gave a great deal of energy to the cataloguing of the many evidences of analogies; and yet he came to the conclusion that, by and large, Indian culture was a product of independent invention in the New World.[5] He granted that the Indians may have received from Oceania through random voyages “one or two cultivable plants and possibly a few more culture elements”—knowledge of how to make crude clay vessels, for example.[6] Hrdlička, too, conceded a small number of sea-borne visitors before Columbus: “It is ... probable that the western coast of America, within the last 2,000 years, was on more than one occasion reached by small parties of Polynesians, and that the eastern coast was similarly reached by small groups of whites, and that such parties may have locally influenced the culture of the Americans.”[7] But Hrdlička considered such voyaging of very little importance.

_There are marked resemblances between the traits of the Maori of
New Zealand and of the Indians of the northwest coast of North
America. Among these are sailing ships and houses. (After figures on
a map by Covarrubias, 1940.)_]

NEW ZEALAND
NORTHWESTERN AMERICA

Only two anthropologists of any standing have favored diffusion. The first of these, Earnest A. Hooton, rejected “the supposition that these various Asiatic invaders brought with them to the New World nothing but a repressed desire to indulge in independent invention, that they came with culturally empty hands, but brains stuffed full of patents to be filed only after arrival.... I have no use at all for the anthropological isolationists who are determined to maintain the incredible dogma that there was no diffusion of inventions and ideas from the Old World to the New, but only of naked human animals.”[8]

Complexity an Argument for Diffusion

The chief modern American proponent of diffusion is Harold S. Gladwin. What is his case? How does he come to his conclusions? He begins, of course, by noting a large number of random resemblances. Some are in simple objects. Some are in complex ones. As he seeks a scientific basis for his argument, he concentrates on the complex things. Complexity seems to rule out coincidence. If a tool has only one or two parts—like a curved throwing stick or a hafted knife—it is not difficult to conceive of two different men inventing it on opposite sides of the world. A bow and arrow with three essential parts presents a little more of a problem, but not too much, for the three parts are dependent on one another. If the bow has a back reinforced by sinew, if the arrow has feathers and a foreshaft, and the foreshaft has a flint arrowhead—making seven elements in all—then one begins to wonder at the mathematical chances of two men exactly duplicating the whole arrangement. Then, consider the vertical loom with nine separate elements, and eleven if it sports a shuttle and a reed fork.

From citing such coincidences, Gladwin turns to the second step of the diffusionist’s argument. This has to do not alone with one complex object, but with unrelated things grouped around it—let us say a vertical loom and bark cloth, painted tripod pottery, and metal casting by the lost wax method. Now if all these disconnected objects can be found in another locality and in use by another people, the suggestion of diffusion becomes far stronger than even in the case of a single complex machine. As Gladwin puts it:

If ... a man should report to the Chinese police that some copper
bells, a vertical loom, some tripod trays, and a roll of bark cloth
had been stolen from his house, and if, after broadcasting the
details, the American police should find all these articles in the
possession of a man in America, where such things had hitherto been
unknown, would the authorities be satisfied with the explanation that
the possessor had independently invented each item? I am inclined to
think that, if I should happen to be the attorney for the defense,
knowing that my client had recently come over from Asia, a plea of
insanity might carry more weight with the jury than my client’s
explanation.

He argues his point still more vividly:

If a Scotsman uses a split-bamboo trout rod, a waterproof silkline,
and a barbed hook, it is not necessarily a case of diffusion if a man
in Saskatchewan is found to be fishing with a willow twig, a piece of
string, and a bent-pin, since each item is dependent upon the others.
But if in addition to their fishing tackle, the Scotsman and the man
in Saskatchewan are found to possess a shot-gun, a flask, a brier-pipe
and bagpipes, then it would look like a case of diffusion since no one
item of the assemblage is dependent upon any other.[9]

Dispersion as Well as Diffusion

The difficulty of this second step in the diffusionist’s argument lies in the fact that it is hard indeed to find a complex of traits in _one_ American locality that resembles exactly a complex of traits in a _single_ Old World one. If the traits are all together in Peru, some may come from one place in the Old World and some from another. Or, if we take a group of traits from a single Old World locale, we find them spread out widely and separately in the Americas. An excellent example of this may be drawn from Oceania and South America. Dixon writes of the diffusionists:

When in South America, they say, you find not only coca-chewing, plank
canoes, and tie-dyeing, but also terraced irrigation, Panpipes, and
the blow gun—all traits widespread in the western Pacific and
southeastern Asia—how can you deny that their occurrence is due to
diffusion, or believe for a moment that so many similar and parallel
inventions could take place? The challenge is a formidable one. Is
there anything that can be said in reply?

Dixon points out that these Oceanic traits are not found _together_ in the New World. The plank canoe is confined to the Santa Barbara Islands and southern Chile; tie-dyeing, to the arid coasts of northern Peru; coca-chewing, originally to the Andean highlands and the tropical forests along its eastern border; terraced irrigation, to the Andes of Peru and Bolivia; the blow gun, to the upper Amazon and Orinoco forests, the Antilles, and the eastern United States; the Panpipe, to the Amazon-Orinoco drainage and southward through Bolivia to northern Chile and the Peruvian coast, and to one or two isolated spots in Ecuador and Colombia. “With one exception the only area where the distribution of any two of these traits is found to overlap lies in the Andean highlands and the tropical forest area to the eastward. Only tie-dyeing and the Panpipe are found together on the coast.” Further, the two traits we find on the coast are separated in the Old World. Tie-dyeing is found specifically in Indonesia “and known in Melanesia only in degenerate form in one small area, whereas the Panpipe is primarily Melanesian and almost unknown in Indonesia.”[10] He seems to be ignorant of double Panpipes connected by a cord which are found in the hinterland of Burma and also in Panama and South America.[11]

No opponent of diffusionism is so blind as to deny the importation of some culture traits by the migrants from northern Asia. Kroeber concedes the fire drill, the spear-thrower, stone chipping, twisting of string, the bow, the throwing harpoon, simple basketry and nets, hunting complexes, cooking stones in vessels of wood, of bark, or of skin, body painting and perhaps tattooing, the domestication of dogs.[12] But, except for these and a few other examples, most anthropologists deny that the American Indians, early or late, brought any objects of their culture from the Old World. Alfred V. Kidder has phrased very neatly their antagonism to “non-stop journeys by bag-and-baggage culture carriers.”[13] This phrase is aimed at a weak chink in the diffusionist’s armor—the fact that Old World traits found, say, in the Southwest, Middle America, or farther south leave no trail across Alaska and down through Canada and over the Great Plains.

In addition, the opponents of diffusion like to point out that certain things in the Indian culture of the northern part of the New World are like certain things in the Indian culture of the southern part, while in between lies a very large area—Middle America and Peru—of entirely different culture traits. Here we find none of the northern and southern things. Nordenskiöld observes that, while some of the identical northern and southern traits may be due to the stimulus of similar cold climates, there are numerous traits that have nothing to do with temperature and humidity. He doubtless feels he is delivering the coup de grâce when he writes:

It is a very characteristic fact that incomparably greater similarity
exists between civilizations as far apart as those of the Calchaquis
of Argentina, and the Pueblos of North America, than between the
culture of any Indian tribe and that of any people in the whole of
Oceania.[14]

If such traits were diffused from one American area to the other, they left no trace between. When we add this to the fact that from Alaska to Middle America there are no traces of even the simplest beginnings of the cultures of the central area, the advocate of independent invention has a pretty good case. In answer, the diffusionist has been tempted to argue that when men are moving rather steadily across an area, they do not leave evidence that is easy to find some millenniums later. Only a hundred years have passed since Brigham Young led his people from Independence, Missouri, to Salt Lake City, and yet there is a singular paucity of spinning wheels and first editions of _The Book of Mormon_ along their trail.

The Trap of Time

Gladwin has a better answer, which is also an attack on a basic weakness of his opponents. Through many years he has been pointing out that friends of the inventive Indian have been getting squeezed tighter and tighter in a trap of their own independent invention. It is the trap of time.

When the Spaniards found the New World, they found it full of inventions and discoveries. There were cities of stone, painted temples, great pyramids. Metal workers smelted ores, made alloys, and cast elaborate ornaments of gold by a most intricate process. There was a complex despotism in Mexico and as complex and despotic a communism in Peru. The Maya had a calendar more accurate than the one Columbus used. They had devised a hieroglyphic writing and knew how to make cement. The Indians of both continents had developed an extensive agriculture, with potatoes and fertilizers in Peru and corn and beans and tomatoes all over the place.

As soon as the archaeologists decided that all this had been invented in the New World with no help to speak of from the Old, they had to recognize that it would take quite a little time. At first this posed a difficulty, for there was no very early evidence of man in Mexico. In 1917, however, came the discovery of skeletons and pottery under a lava flow at Copilco near Mexico City and of a primitive pyramid half buried under the same flow at near-by Cuicuilco; and the archaeologists promptly dated the eruption of the lava at 4000 B.C.

Then, unfortunately, new evidence narrowed the trap of time once more. George C. Vaillant and his wife dated other sites with the same kind of pottery as Copilco considerably later than the birth of Christ. A radiocarbon date based upon charcoal within the pottery level below the Cuicuilco lava falls between these guesses; it is 2422 ± 250 years.[15] The Basket Makers advanced from an estimated 2000 B.C. to a tree-ring date about A.D. 217. And all this time nobody could find any really primitive beginnings of pottery in Middle America, and nothing that seemed earlier than the birth of Christ. The trap of time was growing tighter and tighter. A very elaborate civilization would have to develop in 1,500 years, without any roots. Gladwin pointed out this difficulty and urged the theory that man came into the Americas not only as a paleolithic primitive 15,000 or 25,000 years ago, but as a fairly civilized and perfected neolithic close to the beginning of the Christian era.

Escape from the Trap

The similarity between the traits of the north and the south which Nordenskiöld points out, and the fact that a different lot of traits were dropped in between the others are grist to Gladwin’s diffusion mill. In 1937, when he wrote _Excavations at Snaketown_, he was only beginning to see an answer. By 1947, when _Men Out of Asia_ appeared, he had a fairly complete and certainly an ingenious explanation.

His first proposition is that the Mongoloids came late—very late—and that they brought not much more than the brawn and brains which someone else would later direct. His fifteenth chapter begins with the following parody of a baseball score:

_Score at the End of the Fourth Inning_

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.

What started these South Sea islanders off on their career of civilizing the central part of the Americas? Where did they get some of the traits and some of the physical features that Melanesians and Polynesians do not now possess, as well as their inventive brains? Here Gladwin has a startling and fabulous theory to put forward. Here is where Alexander the Great and his sailors and ships come in.

Dead Alexander Invades America

_Middle American portraits of men who, unlike the generality of
Mongoloids, wore beards. Upper left, the back of a Totonac slate
mirror probably from the state of Veracruz. Upper right, a carving
from Tepataxco, Veracruz. Center, a figure on a pottery vase from
Chama, Guatemala. Lower left, a pottery head found at Tres Zapotes,
Veracruz. Lower right, a carving on a stela at La Venta, which
appears to have an artificial beard such as was worn by the
Egyptians. (The first three, after Vaillant, 1931; the fourth, after
Stirling, 1940; the last, after Covarrubias, 1946.)_]

Before Alexander died in 323 B.C. he brought 5,000 Levantine and Greek shipwrights and sailors to the Persian Gulf and built a navy of 800 vessels. We hear a good deal about what his army did after his death, of the quarrels of generals and the dissipation of their forces—but not a word about the 5,000 nautical men or their fleet. As Gladwin points out, it is hard to imagine that sailors with sound vessels under them would take shore leave and walk home to Greece. If they sailed away from the Persian Gulf, which way would they have gone? They would hardly have sailed southwestward along the Arabian coast; for Alexander died at a season when the winds would have been against them, and the coast is lacking in fresh water and harbors at any time. A southeastward voyage would have been another matter. The wind would have been behind them, and they had already found the coast attractive in that direction.

With this much to go upon, Gladwin sends the fleet of the dead Alexander down the coast of India, past the Spice Islands, and out through Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. On the way the fleet picks up men and women of various races, and stimulates the whole South Seas into a navigating era. The end result is another discovery of America. It is a discovery by a varied and talented people. Along with the Melanesian-Carib and Polynesian-Arawak, the fleet of Gladwin and Alexander finally brings to our western shores those bearded white men with civilizing propensities who are found in the legends of the Toltec and Maya and the peoples of Colombia and Peru. They it is who teach the Mongoloids how to build stone edifices, work metals, weave textiles, and make fine pots. Gladwin documents all this assiduously and even goes to his opponents for evidence.

He bolsters his argument with the “Q Complex”—that list of traits in the cultures of Middle America and the southeastern portion of the United States which Vaillant and Lothrop compiled as being very old indeed and unaccounted for in present theory. _Men Out of Asia_ suggests that the Levantine voyagers brought these things or shaped them after they landed.

He uses with the greatest relish the mass of material on Oceanic traits in the Americas that Nordenskiöld drew together in “Origin of the Indian Civilizations in South America.” Of the forty-nine elements of culture which the Swede found common to both regions, Gladwin points out that more occur in Colombia and Panama than in any other New World area—thirty-eight in all—and that Colombia and Panama surround the spot where ships would have landed if they had followed the Equatorial Counter Current to the Gulf of Darien. From this region as a center the Melanesian and Polynesian traits gradually thin out to the north, the south, and the east.

Against Gladwin’s argument must be set, however, the evidence that Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán has recently developed showing that, among the slaves sent to Mexico from Manila during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were many from New Guinea and other Pacific islands.[16] Was there a similar trade with Colombia, where Oceanic traits are slightly more plentiful than in Mexico and Central America, and with Amazonia, where they are almost as plentiful? It is vitally important, however, to remember that Melanesian slaves cannot possibly be credited with the importation of objects that have been found in pre-Columbian burials—certain Panpipes and mace heads, for example.

There are plenty of other objections, of course, to Gladwin’s theory, even though it seems to explain much that has been a mystery; but there are also defenses that he has not made. If the islands of the Pacific are not too well provided with pottery, pyramids, cement, metallurgy, and textiles, he might have pointed out that they were imperfectly supplied with the proper raw materials. If the white voyagers left their triremes behind in favor of double canoes, and if they did not build Greek temples in the New World, he might have suggested that some generations of sojourn in the South Seas led them to forget a few things. Indeed, it is surprising that these sailors remembered so much of weaving, metal working, and pottery (minus the potter’s wheel). It is equally surprising and just a little disquieting that the white gods, almost as soon as they landed, invented a complex and unique calendar and a hieroglyphic system like nothing they were familiar with. (Perhaps they could not agree on which of the many Old World varieties to use and had to devise something new.)

Before pouncing too heavily on Gladwin and his Alexandrians, it may be well to reread some sentences in his Introduction:

We are going to offer an explanation that will be a radical departure
from those in current circulation, and I shall be the first to admit
that this tale will need a great deal of patching and strengthening
before it will carry much weight. This may seem a strange way to
launch a new theory, but I am more concerned in opening up new
channels of inquiry than in trying to provide pat answers to all the
questions that are plaguing us.... I do not know of anyone who has yet
been rash enough to try to connect the origins of American
civilizations with definite causes, at definite dates, in the progress
of Old World history, and it is for this reason that I have said this
tale will need support and will undoubtedly need to be changed. This,
however, is the way that every theory should be treated, and no harm
will be done if when a new idea is launched it is regarded with due
reserve, but also without prejudice.[17]