Absolute proofs of the origin of the Eskimo, as of that of the various strains of the Indians, are hardly to be expected. Such origins are so gradual and insidious that they would escape detection even if watched for while occurring; they are noticed only after sufficient differences have developed and become established, which takes generations. The solving of racial origins must depend on sound scientific induction.

Such induction may not yet be fully possible in the case of the Eskimo. The evidence is not yet complete. But with the present and other most recent data there is enough on hand for substantial indications. The evidence shows that barring some irregularities, due possibly to later intrusions or refluxes, the farther east in the Eskimo territory the observer proceeds the more highly differentiated and divergent the Eskimo becomes, and there is a greater gap between him and his Indian neighbors, as well as other races. Proceeding from the east westward, conditions are reversed. In general the farther west we proceed the less exceptional on the whole the Eskimo becomes and the more he approximates the Indian, particularly the Indian of Alaska and the northwest coast. As this can not, in the light of present evidence, be attributed alone to mixture, it is plain that if it were possible to proceed a few steps farther in this direction the differences between the Eskimo and the Indian would fade out so that a distinction between the two would become difficult if not impossible.

The facts point, therefore, to an original identity of the source from which were derived the Indian, more particularly his latest branches, and the Eskimo, and to the identification of this source with the palaeo-Asiatic yellow-brown people of lower northern Asia. The differentiation of the Eskimo from this source must have proceeded over a fairly long time, and probably started already it would seem on the northern coasts of Asia, where conditions were present capable of beginning to shape him into an Eskimo; to be carried on since in the Bering Sea area and especially in the Seward Peninsula and farther northward and eastward. In a larger sense the cradle of the Eskimo, therefore, while starting probably in northeast Asia, covered in reality a much vaster region, extending from northern Asia and the Bering Sea to the far American Arctic.