Man made his appearance on the western continent unnumbered ages ago, not unlikely before the close of the glacial period. It is possible that human life began in Asia and western North America sooner than on either shore of the Atlantic. Nothing wholly forbids the belief that America was even the cradle of the race, or one of several cradles, though most scientific writers prefer the view that our species came hither from Asia. De Nadaillac judges it probable that the ocean was thus crossed not at Behring Strait alone, but along a belt of equatorial islands as well. We may think of successive waves of such immigration--perhaps the easiest way to account for certain differences among American races. It is, at any rate, an error to speak of the primordial Americans as derived from any Asiatic stock at present existing or known to history. The old Americans had scarcely an Asiatic feature. Their habits and customs were emphatically peculiar to themselves. Those in which they agreed with the trans-Pacific populations, such as fashion of weapons and of fortifications, elements of folk-lore, religious ideas, traditions of a flood, belief in the destruction of the world by fire, and so on, are nearly all found the world over, the spontaneous creations of our common human intelligence. The original American peoples, various and unlike as they were, agreed in four traits, three of them physical, one mental, which mark them off as in all likelihood primarily of one stock after all, and as different from any Old World men: (1) They had low, retreating foreheads. (2) Their hair was black. (3) It was also of a peculiar texture, lank, and cylindrical in section, never wavy. And (4) their languages were polysynthetic, forming a class apart from all others in the world. The peoples of America, if from Asia, must date back to a time when speech itself was in its infancy.
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