Читать книгу The Mythology of Mayas, Aztecs and Incas - Lewis Spence - Страница 9

An Asiatic origin is, of course, admitted for the aborigines of America, but it undoubtedly stretched back into that dim Tertiary Era when man was little more than beast, and language as yet was not, or at the best was only half formed. Later immigrants there certainly were, but these probably arrived by way of Behring Strait, and not by the land-bridge connecting Asia and America by which the first-comers found entrance. At a later geological period the general level of the North American continent was higher than at present, and a broad isthmus connected it with Asia. During this prolonged elevation vast littoral plains, now submerged, extended continuously from the American to the Asiatic shore, affording an easy route of migration to a type of man from whom both the Mongolian branches may have sprung. But this type, little removed from the animal as it undoubtedly was, carried with it none of the refinements of art or civilisation; and if any resemblances occur between the art-forms or polity of its equal descendants in Asia and America, they are due to the influence of a remote common ancestry, and not to any later influx of Asiatic civilisation to American shores.