Ethnology : in two parts, I. Fundamental ethnical problems. II. The primary ethnical groups / by A.H. Keane.

Augustus Henry Keane

Date:: 1896

Credit: Ethnology : in two parts, I. Fundamental ethnical problems. II. The primary ethnical groups / by A.H. Keane. Source: Wellcome Collection.

376/484 page 340

$long prevailed regarding the mysterious Guatusos of the Rio Frio, Costa Rica, who were said to have fair hair and blue eyes, due to contact with the English buccaneers, or with some Spanish fugitives. But since they have begun to visit the neighbouring markets of San Carlos and San ]os6, the Guatusos are found to have black hair, dark skins and high cheek bones, like the Nicaraguan Chontals to whom they appear to be related\ The Oyariculets of French Guiana, also reported to be white with blue eyes and light beard, are now found to be like other Indians^ Faint traces of the Norse settlers may perhaps be allowed on The japa- north-east coast'; but is it not a violent assump- nesemyth tion to talk of a Scandinavian dispersion over exposed. ^^^^ Northern Continent; to bring Ainu whites to Labrador and Hudson Bay; to build hypotheses on the exploded Fusang legend of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, or to take seriously M. Guillemin-Taraire's statement that the members of a Japanese embassy were able to converse right off (k premiere vue) with certain natives of Sta Barbara County [California], if not to recognise the rock carvings executed by the neighbouring coast tribes, which we are assured are not to be distinguished from objects of a like nature fashioned in Japan (p. 558). Lately Mr O. H. Howarth described before the Anthropological Institute some of these rock inscriptions which he had seen in Sinaloa, West Coast of Mexico, which he also traced to a Japanese source, and which seem likely to furnish an important link in the problem of the prehistoric colonization of Central America''. But amongst the audience was Mr Daigoro Goh, of the Japanese Consulate-General in London, who at once snapped this link with the remark that I do not see any resemblance in those figures of the inscriptions with the prehistoric characters in Japan 1 Reclus, XVII. p. 304, English ed. ^ H. A. Coudreau, Bu/. de la Soc. de Giograph. June 1891. 3 To this source might, for instance, be attributed the high degree of dolichocephaly observed amongst the Micmacs of Nova Scotia, although even this is regarded by Dr Franz Boas as evidence not of Norse but of Eskimo contact. '' Archojological facts tend to indicate that the Eskimo must have lived along the coast of New England at one time {Anthropology of tJu Noi-th American Indiatts, p. 45). * Jour. Anthrop. Inst. Februaiy, 1894, p. 226.$