Note 761 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

The broken bridge across Bering Strait formed by East Cape, Cape Prince of Wales and the Diomede Islands between, and further south the natural causeway of the Commander and Aleutian Islands leading from the peninsula of Kamchatka to that of Unalaska, have facilitated intercourse between Asia and America.761 Justin Winsor says, "There is hardly a stronger demonstration of such connection between the two continents than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper latitudes."762 This resemblance is by no means confined to the Eskimo and Chukches, who have exchanged colonists across Bering Sea. Recent investigations have revealed a wider kinship. The population of northern Siberia speaks in general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct class called "paleasiatics" or "hyperboreans." This class is composed of the Ostyak and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme northeastern Siberia. As far back as 1850, the eminent philologist Robert Latham noted a marked linguistic agreement, both in structure and verbal affinity, between our Northwest Coast tribes and the peoples of the islands and peninsulas fringing northeastern Asia. "Koriak is notably American," he said.763 The recent Jesup Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America and the nearby coast of Asia investigated the Koryak, to determine whether in the past there had been any connection between the cultures and ethnic types of the Old and New World. These investigations have proved beyond doubt a kinship of culture, attributable either to a remote common origin or to former contact, long and close, between these isolated Siberian tribes and the American aborigines. They show that the Koryak are one of the Asiatic tribes standing nearest to the northwestern American Indian.764 [See map page 103.]