d
physical conditions are very similar.[753] We find also widely divergent
races in the southern sections of Africa, Australia or Tasmania and
South America, while Arctic Eurasia and America come as near meeting
ethnically as they do geographically. Here and here only both Eastern
and Western Hemisphere show a strong affinity of race. The Eskimo, long
classed as Mongoloid, are now regarded as an aberrant variety of the
American race, owing to their narrow headform and linguistic affinity;
though in Alaska even their headform closely approximates the Mongoloid
Siberian type.[754] But in stature, color, oblique eyes, broad flat face,
and high cheek bones, in his temperament and character, artistic
productions and some aspects of his culture, he groups with the Asiatic
Hyperboreans across the narrow sixty miles of water forming Bering
Strait.[755] In the northern part of the earth's land area, the
distribution of floras, faunas, and races shows interdependence,
intercourse; in the southern, separation, isolation.

[Sidenote: Continental convergence and ethnic kinship.]

What is true where the hemispheres come together is true also where
continents converge. The core of the Old World is found in the
Mediterranean basin where Europe, Asia and Africa form a close circle of
lands and where they are inhabited by the one white Mediterranean race.
Contrast their racial unity about this common center with the extremes
of ethnic divergence in their remote peripheries, where Teutons,
Mongols, Malays and Negroes differ widely from the Mediterranean stock
and from each other. Eastern Australia represents the ethnic antipodes
of western Asia, in harmony with the great dividing distance between
them, but the sides of these continents facing each other across the
bridge of the Sunda Islands are sparsely strewn with a common Malay
element.

[Sidenote: Africa's location.]

Africa's early development was never helped by the fact that the
continent lay between Asia and South America. It was subjected to strong
and persistent Asiatic Influences, but apparently to no native American
ones. From that far-off trans-Atlantic shore came no signs of life.
Africa appears in history as an appendage of Asia, a cultural peninsula
of the larger continent. This was due not only to the Suez Isthmus and
the narrowness of the Red Sea rift, but to its one-sided invasion by
Asiatic races and trade from the east, while the western side of the
continent lay