Science: Indians in Siberia

One day last fortnight, the conductor and passengers of the westbound train from Irkutsk to Moscow gaped in astonishment at the queer old gentleman who sat with a mouldy, grinning skull in his lap. But Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka smiled benignly back. For he had just been presented with the most precious skull of his career, and he was literally not going to let it out of his clutches.

Dr. Hrdlicka has long maintained that the ancestors of American Indians were Mongolians who crossed from Asia to Alaska over a land bridge some 15,000 years ago. That bridge has since crumbled away, leaving only the stepping-stones of the smoky Aleutian Islands. During ten summers Dr. Hrdlicka has rummaged around the islands, looking for traces of Mongolian wanderers. First great evidence for his theory turned up in 1931, when, on the island of Kodiak, he discovered a nest of long-headed skulls remarkably similar to those of Algonquin Indians. Since the longheads bore no resemblance to the roundheaded Eskimos and Aleuts who now live on the islands, Dr. Hrdlicka called them “pre-Aleuts.”

In 1937, hopping westward to the island of Umnak, Dr. Hrdlicka turned up another rich find of oblong, pre-Aleut skulls, which he sent home to the Smithsonian Institution. Last June he decided to dig for longheads on the Asiatic mainland, went to Irkutsk, Siberia, 1,200 miles from the coast. In a nearby burial ground, girdled by stony mountains, Soviet scientists unearthed a group of long-headed skulls, completely different from the round skulls of present-day Siberian natives. The skulls not only matched those found on the Aleutian Islands but they were dead ringers for Algonquin Indians. Not even expert anthropologists, said Dr. Hrdlicka, could tell them apart.

Convinced after 13 weary years that he had finally proved the Mongolian ancestry of American Indians, happy Dr. Hrdlicka started for home last week. Exactly how the original Indians reached the shores of Alaska he did not know. But he was willing to bet that, after making the arduous journey to the Siberian coast, they traveled to what are now the Japanese-owned Kuril Islands, thence to the Aleutian bridge and North America.