ASIA AND AMERICA

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20839, 22 September 1937, Page 7

ASIA AND AMERICA

EVIDENCE OF LAND BRIDGE Was there once a land bridge between Asia and Alaska? asks the “New York Times." And did man and the animals that seem native to America travel over it out of Asia? There are anthropologists enough who answer both questions affirmatively. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, of the Smithsonian Institution, is not one of them. “I can assert with all positiveness." Dr. Hrdlicka was assured by Philip I. Smith, chief Alaskan geologist of the United States Geological Survey, “that, so far as my own experience in the Seward Peninsula goes, as well as that of present and former members of the Alaskan branch or of any of the records of the Geological Survey, there is no known evidence that proves a land-bridge connection between the American and Asiatic continents during or subsequent to the glacial period.” In the "Journal of Physical Anthropology,” Dr. Hrdlicka quotes not only Smith but the late W. H. Dall, Smithsonian biologist. According to Dall, Behring Strait, over which the land bridge is supposed to have extended, actually separates two faunas. For example, the bones of the ox and the Rocky Mountain sheep are scattered over the American side of the strait, but no traces of them have been discovered on the Asiatic side. The species of mountain sheep found in Alaska and North-eastern Siberia are different. Even the harlequin seal, common within a few miles of the strait in Asia, is not seen in American waters.