p For a long time scholars, particularly American scholars, attempted to prove that Homo Amerindus was descended from a special offshoot of anthropoid ape or a special species of Neanderthal man. But the facts contradict that. The New World could 7iot have been the cradle of man. Long before Columbus the New World was discovered by men from the Old World, who peopled the American continent and were the ancestors of the Indians. Who were those men? When and how did they come to the New World?

p The hypotheses advanced over the past four centuries to explain the origin of the inhabitants of America and the riddle of their high civilisations, which were barbarously destroyed by the* conquistadors, make a fascinating story. Who, indeed, has not been put forward as the forefather of the indigenous population of the New World! The list of “candidates” includes the ancient Egyptians and the no less ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia; the Basques on the coast 59 of the Atlantic and the Japanese on the other side of the world; the nomad Huns and the seafaring Phoenicians; the Cretans, Israelites, Scythians, Normans, Persians, Greeks, Celts, Hittites, Romans, Khmers, Indians, Africans, Chinese and, finally, the inhabitants of mythical Atlantis.

p Fantastic hypotheses continue to appear. Along with the hypotheses the past four centuries have seen the accumulation of evidencelinguistic, anthropological, archeological and enthnographic—that the culture of the American Indians is an original culture, the outcome of long internal development.

p Americanology is a young science in which very much is still debatable and hypothetical. Investigators do not have either a precise chronology or the historical sources possessed by students of the civilisations of the Old World (the hieroglyphic inscriptions left by the American Indians have not yet been deciphered). Nevertheless, the majority of Americanists believe the origin of the American Indians to be basically a settled question. The first explorers came to the New World from Asia. The American Indians are an enormous branch of the Mongoloid race. Anthropology and genetics indicate this, as do the splendid works of art of pre-Columbian America. Ancient sculptural monuments and clay statuettes fashioned several thousand years ago depict people with slanting eyes and other marked Mongoloid features.

p How many years were the first settlers of America ahead of Christopher Columbus? When did man first set foot on New World soil? So far, no exact answer can be given to this question. The most modest estimates say 15,000 years ago. 60 Dick Edgar Ibarra Grasso, the Bolivian archeologist and ethnographer, puts it at f>0,000 years. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, which would be that man first appeared in America 30,000 to 40,000 years before Europeans came there.

p How did he get to the New World? It was clearly beyond the powers of Paleolithic man to sail across the ocean, for he did not make either boats or rafts that could have negotiated the many hundreds of miles between Asia and America. At either end of the New World, though, the distances are not particularly great. Only small expanses of water separate Alaska from Chukotka and Tierra del Fuego from the North Antarctic.

p According to the Portuguese anthropologist Mendez-Correa, America was peopled by way of Antarctica at a time when the Antarctic continent was not yet covered with ice; man first reached Antarctica from Australia, and from there journeyed to Tierra del Fuego. This bold hypothesis is refuted by many facts. In the first place, the Fuegians have no features in common with the Australians; secondly, Antarctica was covered with ice long before Homo sapiens appeared on earth; thirdly, Australia was peopled later than America; and fourthly, the most important point: the peopling of the New World proceeded from the north to the south and not the other way. People appeared in South America between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, but the shores of the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego were settled only at the beginning of our era. The oldest traces of human habitation found on the territory of the United States date hack more than 25,000 years!

p Man could not have reached America by sea. He could not have crossed the ocean 25,000 years ago. That means the first explorers reached the New World not by the southern Tierra del Fuego-Antarctic route, but by the northern route, from Chukotka. Yet no traces of ancient man have been found on either side of the Bering Strait. Probably those traces now lie not on land, where archeologists have been searching for them, but under water.

p Bering Land is what some geologists call the land whicli once existed in place of the present Chukotsk Sea and northern part of the Bering Sea. Rocky St. Lawrence Island and the two Diomede islands are remnants of this land mass. This is the bridge whicli primitive man probably used to cross over from Asia into America. Americanists are not yet certain as to what part of the vast Asian continent provided the first settlers of the New World. But each passing year furnishes more evidence that the area was probably the Soviet Union’s Far Eastern seaboard and the Kamchatka Peninsula.

p In 1964 an archeological expedition of the Siberian Department of the USSB Academy of Sciences under N. N. Dikov found, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, a site that is from 14,000 to 15,000 years old. This dates back to approximately the time when the Bering Sea land bridge was used as a route to the American continent. The most notable thing about the finds is that they show connections between the ancient Kamchatkan culture and the Indian cultures of America. For instance, Soviet archeologists found a large number of beads and pendants that are strikingly reminiscent of the famous Indian wampum. The arrowheads used by the 62 ancient inhabitants of Kamchatka also have much in common with those of the American Indians. Further, both used red ochre in their burial rites.

p The location, antiquity and largely Americanoid nature of this first Paleolithic monument discovered in North-East Asia are all new and impressive evidence that early settlers of America (although perhaps not the original settlers), came from Asia via the extreme north-east, in particular, via the Kamchatka Peninsula and the ancient land mass connecting Asia with America in the north.

p Bering Land began to sink at the end of the last glacial period, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. Traces of the primitive explorers, camp sites, stone and ivory implements and, possibly, burial sites similar to the one which Soviet archeologists have found on the Kamchatka Peninsula, all disappeared beneath the waves. Underwater archeologists will probably come upon these traces some day and add data brought up from the floor of the Chukotsk and Bering seas to the "land data”.

p Perhaps the route to the New World did not lie so far to the north. After all, the Komandorskiye and Aleutian islands stretch in a long chain between Kamchatka and Alaska. There is both oceanographical and geological evidence that land subsidence took place there not so long ago. A group of guyots, or underwater volcanoes, whose peaks once rose above the surface, has been discovered in the Gulf of Alaska. (For example, the Dickens Guyot lies at a depth of only 475 metres; it is surrounded by depths of 3,000 to 3,500 metres.) This indicates that underwater archeologists may look forward to interesting 63 discoveries not only in now submerged Bering Land but also much farther south.

p The great Alaskan earthquake of March 1964 substantially changed the surrounding topography. It may be assumed that in remote times even more significant movements of the earth’s crust took place south of Bering Land, that the ocean swallowed up many kilometres of coast and drowned many islands and islets.

p When originally settled, a large part of North America was covered by a vast ice cap. The newcomers could advance only through narrow passages free of ice. Their route lay along a now submerged coastal strip of the Pacific Ocean.

p The enormous underwater canyons along the west coast of the United States and Baja California indicate that there was once land where the ocean is now. Many of the submarine canyons come up almost to the shore and are amazingly similar to the canyons on land both in shape and structure.

p An astonishing find made by scuba divers in the area of La Jolla Canyon near the Gulf of California shows that people once lived in places now at the bottom of the ocean. From the floor of the Pacific the divers brought up a large number of metates, stones which Indians have used for grinding cereal seeds since the most ancient times.

This is the only discovery of its kind. But it should be remembered that La Jolla is probably the most thoroughly studied area of the submarine Pacific, for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the largest centre in the world studying the ocean, is located there. If the floor along the whole Pacific coast of America is 64 studied with equal thoroughness we may look forward to a great many astonishing finds that will put the Indian metates in the shade.