32 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s. t 22, 1920
that changes of climate destructive enough to make the discomforts of mass migration preferable to readjustment in loco, would be likely to result in such migration. That precisely such climatic cataclisms will result in the destruction and mass migration of animals, has often been hypothesized and described. Kropotkin has given us a very vivid picture of these phenomena in the opening chapters of his "Mutual Aid." After Pumpelly's expedition, to which Professor Teggart gives due credit, there remains no doubt that periods of desiccation in Turkestan were accompanied by migrations, evidently on a considerable scale. All this however is not sufficient to justify the designation of a " constant" in appli- cation to the causal link " climate-migration." For, does violent climatic change always cause migration and dees migration follow from no other antecedents? I am unable to answer the first query without further consultation of relevant data, should such be in existence. As to the second, it must be answered in the negative in the face of those vast areas of human migrations to which refer- ence was made above. That climatic changes should have been responsible, for instance, for the migrations of hordes of Athapas- cans from the interior of Canada along the Pacific coast and down to the Pueblos of the Southwest, of this there is, to my knowledge, no evidence whatsoever. The same applies to the Bantu migra- tions of the southeast of Africa. As to the migrations of the Papu- ans and Melanesians, what we know of their direction and extent discourages any climatological interpretation. Moreover, the
the unlikelihood of migration on anything like a large scale unless the people are actually "driven"; for we learn that "man is prone to remain where he is, to fixity. in ideas and in ways of doing things, and only through nature's insistant driving has he been shaken out of his immobility and set wayfaring upon the open road" (p. 76). To this is joined the somewhat absurd assertion of Keane that "most African negroes south of the equator, most Oceanic negroes (Melanesians and Papuans), all Australian and American aborigines have remained in their original habitats ever since what may be called the first settlement of the earth by man [sic !]" (p. 64). Without dis- puting in the least the faith in human inertia reflected in the above general statement, and siding with the author in his rejection of the hypothesis that "man is primarily a migratory, restless being "(p. 76), one is but little impressed by specifications such as these in the face of the extant evidence for minor as well as major migrations pro- vided by the linguistic map of North America, by traditional and much convergent semi-historical material from the entire southeast of Africa, and by traditional, soma- tological and general cultural data from the Papuan-Melansian district.
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