considerable varieties of culture. Some of the probable traits brought from the mother-land are the fire-drill, stone chipping and polishing, twisting of string, the bow, throwing stick, the harpoon, simple basketry and nets, hunting complexes, cooking with stones in vessels of wood, bark or skin, body-painting, and perhaps tattooing, and the domestication of the dog. Some of these may have filtered through Alaska from time to time, but the facts in the case favor the view that in the main they came in with the original immigrants. Independently, the New World developed agriculture, pottery, the higher types of basketry and cloth weaving, the working of the softer metalf and the manufacture of bronze. The progress in astronomical knowledge and the fine arts compares favorably with that achieved by the early Asiatics. Yet, in all we see the marks of originality which are alone sufficient evidence of their independent origin.
The centers of civilization in the New World were the highlands of Mexico and western South America which, as they developed, reacted to the stimulus of their more backward brothers in other parts of the land in much the same fashion as did the different groups of Mongoloid peoples in Asia. One of the significant points in our discussion has been the identification of the fundamental widely diffused complexes in the cultures of the New World, many of which seem to center in the Mexican and Andean regions of higher civilization and from which their respective radiations are often apparent. The more recent studies of ancient Chinese culture show that a somewhat parallel condition existed in Asia. Apparently, then, we have a more isolated people in the New World who did not travel the road to higher culture so rapidly as their relatives in Asia, the connection between whose centers of development having long been broken by climatic changes and later almost completely blocked by hordes of primitive hunter and fisher-folk. As to what a few more thousand years of this freedom would have done for the New World, we can but speculate; yet, one can scarcely forego the regret that the American Indians did not start on their career many years earlier than they did.
