2.12 America: 200 to 101 b.c.

America

Back to America: 300 to 201 B.C.

North america

The far north and canada

There was no interruption of the Dorset Society previously described in the Arctic north. In southeastern Canada, particularly in the region of Nova Scotia, the Micmac Indians eventually had script writing. Although usually credited to work of later French priests, Fell (Ref. 65 , 66 ) gives some evidence indicating an east Libyan origin from near the Egyptian border where Herodotus said that an Adrymachid tribe had adopted Egyptian manners. He dates the contact of Libyan sailors with the Micmacs to this century but only further investigation can really settle this one way or another.

We have recorded previously that some authorities feel that Asian migrations to North America via a Pacific northern route continued by boat down to about 2,000 B.C. If true, then over the vast expanse of some 20,000 to 30,000 years a great variety of people could have made this trek. We know for certain that the Aleuts and the Eskimos are separate from true Amerindians and that the Athabascans of central, north Canada were relatively late comers, different in culture and language from most other Indians. Now we shall describe still another group of people, occupying the far western shore and the off-shore islands of Canada, who appear to be different from all other early North American inhabitants in many ways and who developed in an isolated situation along the Canadian waterways, shut off from inland Canada by precipices and wild mountains. These are the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Kwakiutl of northwestern Vancouver Island, both ranking among the tallest people in the world. They appear to be related to the Salish or Flathead Indians who later inhabited northern Montana, apparently coming down gradually from Bella Coola and British Columbia. These people are dolichocephalic while most American Indians are brachycephalic; their complexions are fair and their hair of ten soft and brown, rather than Mongolian coarse and black. The earliest European visitors to the western Canadian islands - Cook, Dixon and Vancouver - all emphasized those features. In addition those northwest coast people of ten had strong mustaches and beards, in contrast to the usually totally beardless Amerindians. Thus they have many Caucasian features and are physically identical to true Polynesians. Their homesites in the Canadian islands probably represent way-stations on the trip these people made from some place in Asia in ancient times to the eventual destination of some of them, in Polynesia. If they are related to Malaysians it is a very distant relationship and the two physically dissimilar peoples must have separated from an original stem in very ancient days, before the Malayasians even migrated down into the peninsula now bearing their name. The theme of the unity of the northwest American Indians and the Polynesians will be further developed in subsequent chapters.

The united states

The expanding Hopewell sphere extended from the Alleghenies to the western border of the Mississippi alley, north to the Great Lakes, south to Florida and the Gulf States. Their craftsmen obtained obsidian for knives and arrowheads from the Yellowstone area of Wyoming as well as other rocks from Montana and North Dakota. We have not emphasized it previously but the Woodland Culture with its burial mounds, pipes, stone and copper gorgets, wooden carvings, pottery effigies and earrings existed in the south as early as 1,000 B.C. onto this 2nd century B.C. and beyond. Burial mounds up to forty feet in height are scattered throughout the south. (Ref. 267 )