Eskimos and Aleuts: Their Origins and Evolution

Abstract

The emerging picture for the immediate origin of New World Mongoloids, the Eskimos and Aleuts, is that of a Bering platform inhabited by contiguous isolates stretching from Hokkaido around to what is now Umnak Island, probably some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. The lithic similarities between Anangula and Hokkaido and the similarities in human morphology suggest this. The probable linguistic relationship between Eskimo and Aleut on the one hand and Chukchi, Koryak, and Kamchadal on the other is in general agreement with this picture and raises the possibility that the Yupik-speaking Eskimos of Siberia and St. Lawrence Island may be derived from populations that formerly lived on the Bering Platform and withdrew toward their present locations as the platform was inundated. Diffusion of traits, both genetic and cultural, from the center in southwestern Alaska became of increasing importance as the population differential between south and north became greater. Once Bering Strait became a channel, major migrations ended; successional continuity is indicated wherever deep stratified sites are found. Paleo-Indians (proto-Mongoloids or semi-Mongoloids) were clearly established in South and Central America before 10,000 B.C. Their separation from ancestral Eskimo-Aleut-Chukchi Mongoloids was probably insured by differences in economic adaptation and therefore by differences in their routes of migration into the New World. The land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska during early Wisconsin time, as early as 35,000 years ago and as late as 11,000 years ago, was more than 1000 miles wide. The ancestral Indians, with their land-based economy, could have crossed often, following big game, without coming in contact with the Mongoloids, who worked their way along the coastal edge of the reduced Bering Sea. Upon reaching the end of the Bering Platform, the Umnak Island of today, the Mongoloids flourished, owing to the richness of the marine fauna. As deglaciation proceeded from west to east, they spread in two directions, following the retreating ice and setting out in boats toward the western Aleutian Islands. The earliest known Aleut skeleton is some 4000 years old. Early Kodiak Eskimo skeletons slightly less old and easily distinguishable from the Aleut skeleton. The populations have not become demonstrably more similar, but they have undergone some parallel changes. As a distinctive group in their present form, Mongoloids represent a recent evolutionary development that has occurred within the past 15,000 years. They do share more discontinuous traits with middle-Pleistocene Sinanthropus than members of any other living racial divisions, though Sinanthropus is clearly different from a modern Mongoloid. Interferences concerning long-term connections must remain tentative in view of the small number of fossil remains, the great time spans, and the deficiencies in out knowledge of the modes of inheritance of many traits. However, when we find that significant differences have developed, over a short time span, between closely related and contiguous peoples, as in Alaska and Greenland, and when we consider the vast differences that exist between remote groups such as Eskimos and Bushmen, who are known to belong within the single species of Homo sapiens, it seems justifiable to conclude that Sinanthropus belongs within this same diverse species.