It may be true that all the aboriginal peoples found inhabiting North
and South America, save the Esquimaux, belonged originally to the same
race. Some writers assume it to be true, although it seems strongly
improbable, not to say impossible. If they were all of the same race,
time and development, under different conditions of life, had divided
this race into at least two extremely unlike branches. The wild Indians
of North America were profoundly different from the ancient people of
Central America and Peru. The Pueblo or Village Indians of New Mexico
have scarcely any thing in common with the Apaches, Comanches, and
Sioux. Even the uncivilized Indians of South America are different from
those in the United States. Our wild Indians have more resemblance to
the nomadic Koraks and Chookchees found in Eastern Siberia, throughout
the region that extends to Behring's Strait, than to any people on this
continent. Those who have seen these Siberians, traveled with them, and
lived in their tents, have found the resemblance very striking; but I
infer from what they say that the Korak or Chookchee is superior to the
Indian. See Kennan's "Tent Life in Siberia."
Mr. Lewis H. Morgan finds evidence that the American aborigines had a
common origin in what he calls "their systems of consanguinity and
affinity." If it can be made to appear beyond question that these
systems prevail and are identical every where from Patagonia to the
Arctic Zone, his argument will have great force. But this has not yet
been shown. He says: "The Indian nations, from the Atlantic to the Rocky
Mountains, and from the Arctic Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, with the
exception of the Esquimaux, have the same system. It is elaborate and
complicated in its general form and details; and, while deviations from
uniformity occur in the systems of different stocks, the radical
features are, in the main, constant. This identity in the essential
characteristics of a system so remarkable tends to show that it must
have been transmitted with the blood to each stock from a common
original source. It affords the strongest evidence yet obtained of unity
in origin of the Indian nations within the region defined."
But unity in race among wild Indians found within the region specified
would be sufficiently manifest without this evidence. That the same
system of consanguinity and affinity, with precisely the same features
of identity, ever was extended over the whole continent, remains
unproved. The supposed traces of it among the Pueblos are by no means
clear. A more complete and accurate research is required to show that
identically the same system ever has existed any where between the
United States and Patagonia. A system not wholly unlike it, though not
the same, might grow up any where in widely separated tribal communities
of barbarous peoples, without doing any thing more than the tribal
system itself to show a common origin in race.
The aborigines of America may have been originally all of the same race.
There are some considerations in favor of this hypothesis which have
been used by writers entitled to great respect; but it can not yet be
claimed with reason that they have been able to settle this question
beyond the reach of doubt, even in their own minds. Therefore, to speak
moderately, it would be premature to assume that the Mound-Builders were
even remotely of the same race with the wild Indians, from whom they
were so different in all we know of them.
The attempt to establish this hypothesis of identity in race has given
rise to a tendency to underrate the development of the ancient people of
Mexico and Central America, and to lower the estimate of their
attainments sufficiently to bring them within reach of close
relationship to the wild Indians. The difficulty being reduced in this
way, there follows an attempt to get rid of it entirely, and establish
connection between these unlike peoples, by talking of "Semi-Village
Indians." But the hypothesis used in this case is not well warranted by
facts. Such "Semi-Village Indians" as are supposed, really standing half
way between the savages and the Pueblos, and being actually savages half
developed into Pueblos, have never had a clearly defined and
unquestionable existence here since the continent became known to
Europeans. In the border region between the northern wild Indians and
the old Mexican race there are exceptional communities formed by
association or mixture, but we can not reasonably give them the
significance claimed for the supposed "Semi-Village Indians." Moreover,
these exceptional communities are usually Pueblos whose habits have been
changed and their civilization lessened by association with wild
Indians, or in some other way. The Navajos began their present condition
by fleeing to the mountains from the Spaniards. The Mound-Builders, who
must have been, still more than the Pueblos, unlike the barbarous
Indians, can not be explained by any reference whatever to such
communities. If they were of the same race, they were far from being the
same people.
Some ethnologists, whose suggestions are entitled to respectful
attention whether accepted or rejected, specify considerations which
they believe forbid us to regard the ancient Mexicans and the northern
wild Indians as identical in race. They point to the well known fact
that the fauna of the American continent below the northern frontier of
Mexico is remarkably different from that between this line and the
Arctic Sea. At the north, America abounds in species similar to those of
Europe and Asia, with some admixture of forms wholly American, while at
the south the old-world forms disappear, and the fauna of the whole
region between Mexico and Cape Horn becomes "as peculiar as that of
Australia."
The explanation given is, that during the glacial period the larger
part of North America, like Northern Asia and Europe, was covered with
ice and partly submerged, and that the fauna found in this part of North
America was introduced after the glacial period by immigration from Asia
and Europe over connecting lands or islands at the northwest and the
northeast, and perhaps by some migration from the south; the fauna at
the south meanwhile remaining very much as it was before, with very
little change through later migrations from the north.
Professor Huxley called attention to this subject in a brief address to
the London Ethnological Society in 1869. After stating the case, he
presented the following queries and suggestions: "The Austro-Columbian
fauna, as a whole, therefore, existed antecedently to the glacial epoch.
Did man form part of that fauna? To this profoundly interesting question
no positive answer can be given; but the discovery of human remains
associated with extinct animals in the caves of Brazil, by Lund, lends
some color to the supposition. Assuming this supposition to be correct,
we should have to look in the human population of America, as in the
fauna generally, for an indigenous or Austro-Columbian element, and an
immigrant or 'Arctogeal' element." He then suggests that the Esquimaux
may now represent the immigrant element, and the old Mexican and South
American race that which was indigenous, and that the "Red Indians of
North America" may have appeared originally as a mixture of these two
races. He adds, very reasonably, "It is easy to suggest such problems as
these, but quite impossible, in the present state of our knowledge, to
solve them."