American Genesis: The American Indian and the Origins of Modern Man

42 AMERICAN GENESIS
and Asia amid the coming and going of four different ice ages
(that is, from 1,000,000 to 10,000 years ago). With each succ~sive
ice age, the prevailing hominids became more technologIcally
advanced. Building fires, fashioning clothing of animal
skins, and living in caves and other shelters, they learned to survive
the crippling cold. With increasingly sophisticated tools and
weapons, they lived by preying upon the reindeer and woolly
mammoths that roamed across the entire continent. In time, the
accepted theory states, long after fully modem man appeared,
Mongoloid (east Asian) hunters wandered up through Siberia
and crossed over into the virginal New World in the Bering Strait
area,
The Bering route theory comes of distinguished parentage:
Thomas Jefferson first authored this theory. In his Notes of Virginia,
published in 1781, Jefferson wrote about an Indian burial
mound he excavated and how he believed the Indians came from
Asia by way of the far north.
The Mongoloids were readily accepted as the Indians' forefathers
chiefly because of what the great naturalist Alexander von
Humboldt described as a "striking analogy between the Americans
and the Mongol race." (I) Early physical anthropologists
such as Ernest Albert Hooton of Harvard confirmed von Humboldt's
analogies; Hooton's book Up From the Ape, published in
1946, noted that the Indians supposedly all exhibited a Mongoloid
wash of features which included dark hair and eyes, medium
brown skin, straight hair, a relative absence of facial or body bair,
and wi~e cheek bones. The Eskimo, the last migrant to arrive,
was pOinted to as the most MongolOid in appearance, with his
smooth forehead, marked eyelid folds infantile nose and yellow
skin. I I
But these early phYSical anthropologists made serious mistakes
and exclusions in their analyses. All Indians of course do not
look
.
alike. There is t
remen
d
ous p
h'
YSlcal vanahon
.' .
among
'In
the -
dlans, variations whi h hi t . . .
I d' c n at ongms as varied as suggested m
n Ian mythology If Indi f' .
bl
. . ans are 0 ASIan origin, why are thetr
ood types which' d'
, 10 Icate mankind's genetic relationships, and