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Show Nature Aided In Settlement Of America Earliest Migrants Drove Towards Coast or Followed Fol-lowed Interior Valleys Prepared by National Geographic Society, Washington, D. C. WNU Service. Like most major discoveries, discover-ies, the finding of America by its first settlers took place in easy stages. Shortly after the retreat of the last great ice sheet, some venturesome Asiatic wanderer, a prehistoric prehis-toric Columbus of name unknown, un-known, crossed the narrow strip of sea between East Cape, Siberia, and Alaska. The crossing at that time could have been made on the ice, but it might also have been accomplished in skin boats or canoes, a feat not infrequently in-frequently performed by Eskimos Es-kimos of today. The Americas were not populated by descendants of these first discoverers. discov-erers. It is likely that through many centuries Asiatic people, responding re-sponding to population pressure from the south and west, found this natural route into the American continent, con-tinent, just as successive streams of European immigration later penetrated pene-trated inland from the Atlantic seaboard. sea-board. Archeological evidence indicates that most of these migrants did not linger long in the far north but pushed southward along the coasts in their canoes, or followed the interior in-terior valleys. So completely did they establish themselves that, when the Europeans Euro-peans arrived, the two continents, and practically all of the adjacent islands as well, were occupied from the Arctic coast to the extremity of Teirra del Fuego. Nature Aids Indians. From the fur-clad Eskimo of the frozen Arctic coast, living in his ingenious in-genious snow house, to the naked savage of the steaming tropical jungle jun-gle of the Amazon basin, with his equally suitable palm - thatched home, the descendants of these first American immigrants demonstrated their adaptability in countless ways. Thus the wandering bands of primitive Shoshom, living in the Chester Yellowhair, Navajo Indian youth, is typical of today's to-day's Arizona Indian. In the face of generations of pressure to abandon his Indianship the Indian is coming back. thought and subtle shades of meaning. mean-ing. Their vocabularies were as complete as the experience of the speakers permitted, and the grammatical gram-matical structure intricate and systematic. sys-tematic. The principal linguistic stocks north of Mexico are the Eskimauan, which includes the entire Arctic coast from Alaska to Greenland; Athapascan, which includes Alaska and most of the interior of Canada west of Hudson bay, and reappears in Arizona, New Mexico, and western west-ern Texas; Algonquin, which stretches across southern Canada from the Rocky mountains to the Atlantic, thrusting south of the Great Lakes to Tennessee; the Iro-quoian, Iro-quoian, which includes th valley of the St. Lawrence river and the regions re-gions around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, south to northern Georgia. The Shoshonean stock includes the Great Basin region and northern Texas; the Siouan takes in most of the Great Plains and parts of the Carolinas and Virginia. The Mudkhogean stock covers most of the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, am Florida. The varieties in physical type among the Indians were not so great nor so strikingly as the cultural differences. dif-ferences. All American Indians can be classified clas-sified generally as belonging to the Mongoloid stock, to which the people of eastern Asia also belong. The principal differences are hj y 1 " f t K X, rk I The Indian of today does not live the nomadic life of his forebears. Here a group of Santa Clara Pueblo Indians are making pottery at the doorstep of their home in New Mexico. The Indian population, according to government survey, is the most rapidly growing group in the country. parched deserts of the Great Basin, found food in the sparse and spiny plants of the region. They knew the location of the scattered springs and how to capture edible grasshoppers and fly larvae from the lakes. Among these simple bands, the only recognizable social unit was the family group. While these and other primitive groups were wresting a bare existence, exist-ence, the great civilization of the Maya developed and flourished for 1,500 years on the mountainous highlands high-lands of Guatemala, the tropical lowlands of the Motagua river, and among the thorny scrub of Yucatan. The equally great Inca culture of ancient Peru arose on the arid desert des-ert of the Pacific coast and in the bare and chilly highlands of the Andes. The Aztecs, shortly before the coming of the Spaniards, had succeeded suc-ceeded in building up a mighty military mili-tary nation in the temperate Valley of Mexico. Wherever the early white explor-' ers went, they found diversity in culture, cul-ture, adaptability to environment. This variation is illustrated most strikingly by languages. North of Mexico alone, at the time of the conquest, con-quest, there were more than 50 unrelated un-related linguistic stocks, and 700 distinct dis-tinct dialects. These dialects differed dif-fered from one another as English differs from German or French, and the linguistic stocks have nothing in common in vocabulary or grammatical grammat-ical structure. It is evident, therefore, that numerous peoples of different origin had been isolated for long periods. Since phonetic writing was never developed in the New world, there was no means of stabilizing and holding together a language for any considerable time. Vocabularies Are Complete. Ail these native American languages lan-guages were capable of expressing physiognomy, head form, and stature. stat-ure. The Indians of the eastern United States and of the Great Plains area were usually tall and stalwart in build, frequently exhibiting exhibit-ing the aquiline nose which we so commonly associate with the typical typ-ical Indian face. Indians of this type also prevail in western and southern South America. Southern Indians Shorter. On the other hand, the Indians of Mexico, Central America, and the Amazon basin were considerably shorter in stature and darker in complexion, with broad and flatter noses. Ethnologists estimate the total population of this area at approximately approxi-mately 1,150,000. Of this number 846,000 were within the limits of the present United States, 220,000 were in Canada, 72,000 in Alaska, and 10,-000 10,-000 in Greenland. Norse Describe Indians. After these enterprising people had discovered America, populated it, and developed their interesting and diverse cultures, it remained for the Europeans to discover the Indians. When Norsemen visited the New England coast during the first two decades of the Eleventh century, their all too brief descriptions of the savages, or "skraellings," indicate that the latter were an Algonquin people whose customs changed but little during the next few centuries. They were clad in skin clothing, armed with bows and arrows, and used stone axes. They navigated the rivers in birchbark canoes and eagerly traded their furs for strips of red flannels to bind about their heads. The Norsemen also described "self-sown wheat fields," but it is impossible to say whether these were fields of cultivated maize or of wild rice. |