THE AMERICAN INDIAN

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 117, 13 November 1935, Page 11

THE AMERICAN INDIAN

QUESTION OF ORIGIN

A THEORY SHATTERED

WASHINGTON, November 11,

The long-standing theory of the Melanesian or Australoid origin of American Indians was shattered today by Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, anthropologist of the Smithsonian Institution, after a critical examination of all available evidence. He ;;aid that an examination of 10,000 crania of North and South American Indians failed to reveal anything representing the true Melanesian or Australoid. He further contended that the theory of Melanesian settlement in the new world was self-con-tradictory. "According to various indications, the spread of Melanesians into the South Seas bslonged essentially to the last millennium before the Christian era. By that time the new world had been populated for several thousand years. Judging from the reception given the first contingent of whites, what chance would there have been for a small stray group of any other people, especially one not superior of the lative Americans?" He added that the idea of Australian colonisation was even more absurd. 'There is reason to doubt whether Australia itself was peopled at the time 3f the earliest Asiatic colonisation of America," he said. "If they came, how 3id they get here? It has been proposed that they came along the shores of Antarctica at a time when the land was much warmer than at present, but to have done so they would have had to come to America before there was the slightest trace on earth of human beings."'