There remain two champions of multiform and multitudinous migrations—José Imbelloni of Argentina and Harold S. Gladwin. They go further than any of their predecessors in peopling the New World with varied races, and further in advancing transpacific migrations as an important factor in the history of the Americas.
Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World?
Both Imbelloni and Gladwin begin with a suggestion that Pygmies deserve consideration. These primordial migrants trod their tiny paces from some unknown fatherland to the forests of the Congo and the jungles of New Guinea, to islands like the Andamans and possibly to Tasmania. The presence of five-foot Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego suggests to both Imbelloni and Gladwin that Pygmies may have preceded the Australoids to the New World. The advent of Pygmies in Tierra del Fuego as well as in Tasmania may be open to question; for in both places the natives, though short, exceeded the average of Pygmy height by a few inches, and their heads, instead of being round like those of the Pygmies, are recorded as of medium cephalic index.
After the Tasmanian strain, Imbelloni carries over by land a Melanesian type to lay their skulls in Lagoa Santa, Punin, Texas, and Lower California. Next came tall people, “comparable partly to the Australian type,” who seem to be the Indians of plains and pampas. These were the last of the land-borne migrants until the present era. Hereafter they came by sea. The fourth element was a Proto-Indonesian people that settled exclusively in South America and mainly in Amazonia. With the fifth group Imbelloni presents the first frank Mongoloids, round-headed and inclined to agriculture; they settled in the Southwest, in Middle America, and along the Andean coast. An almost identical people—whom Imbelloni calls the Isthmid—spread through the center of the same area shortly after the birth of Christ and brought to fruition the civilizations which Cortez and Pizarro found in the New World. To top off his list, Imbelloni brings over the Eskimo and men for the American Northwest—but by no longer a sea voyage than Bering Strait.[24]
Gladwin’s theories appeared first in the second volume of _Excavations at Snaketown_, and were presented in altered and amplified form through his rather antic book _Men Out of Asia_. They are completely heretical, completely fascinating, and in some respects uncommonly plausible. They are certainly a tonic.