scarcely conceivable that the peoples of the two hemispheres could ever have been in contact without exchanging some of their seeds and certainly impossible to assume that the agriculture of the New World was directly derived from the Old.
But our case does not rest upon this one observation, for there are others of almost equal weight. The wheel is a fundamental concept in the Old World and clearly of great antiquity, but is singularly absent from the New World,[1] even its spinners and potters failing to grasp the principle. The use of iron is another, though perhaps later, invention of the Old World that remained peculiar to it. However, the facts of cultivated plants and the wheel, which must be very ancient in origin, make a strong case for the peopling of the New World either at a very remote period or by wild tribes only, such as might arise from contact between the historic tribes of Alaska and Siberia.
On the other hand, the New World peoples did achieve some of the specific inventions of the Old; for instance, the making of bronze and casting gold, silver, copper, etc.; again, in certain methods of weaving and dyeing. It is sometimes objected that the knowledge of these traits could have been handed over or relayed from southern Asia to Mexico by the intervening wild tribes; but this seems fanciful, for while we do find certain traits spread over adjacent parts of the two continents, as the sinew-backed bow, the bowdrill, the magic flight myth, the opium type of smoking, all of which are considered as of Asiatic origin, their distribution is continuous from Alaska downward, and fades out before we reach the southern continent. Further, it has been assumed that the ideas underlying a trait could be carried along as part of a myth and so pass from one of the higher cultures of Asia to Mexico by way of Siberia and Alaska. There is no a priori improbability in this notion that specific ideas can be carried from tribe to tribe as constituent parts of mythical tales. The difficulty is that notwithstanding our very complete knowledge of typical tribal mythologies, we are so far unable to find examples of such extensive transmissions of the process concepts underlying specific culture traits. As we have noted
- ↑ Tylor (no date); Means, 1916. I.
