and Aleutian Islands leading from the
peninsula of Kamchatka to that of Unalaska, have facilitated intercourse
between Asia and America.[761] Justin Winsor says, "There is hardly a
stronger demonstration of such connection between the two continents
than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite
sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper latitudes."[762] This
resemblance is by no means confined to the Eskimo and Chukches, who have
exchanged colonists across Bering Sea. Recent investigations have
revealed a wider kinship. The population of northern Siberia speaks in
general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes
whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who
have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct class called
"paleasiatics" or "hyperboreans." This class is composed of the Ostyak
and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the
Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and
Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme
northeastern Siberia. As far back as 1850, the eminent philologist
Robert Latham noted a marked linguistic agreement, both in structure and
verbal affinity, between our Northwest Coast tribes and the peoples of
the islands and peninsulas fringing northeastern Asia. "Koriak is
notably American," he said.[763] The recent Jesup Expedition to the
Northwest Coast of America and the nearby coast of Asia investigated the
Koryak, to determine whether in the past there had been any connection
between the cultures and ethnic types of the Old and New World. These
investigations have proved beyond doubt a kinship of culture,
attributable either to a remote common origin or to former contact, long
and close, between these isolated Siberian tribes and the American
aborigines. They show that the Koryak are one of the Asiatic tribes
standing nearest to the northwestern American Indian.[764] [See map page
103.]

[Sidenote: Polynesian affinities.]

W.H. Dall finds the inhabitants of the Pacific slope of North America
conspicuously allied with Oceanica in cultural achievements, whose
origin he therefore assigns to that vast congeries of islands stretching
from Asia toward South America in latitude 25 deg. south. These islands,
closely clustered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with
widening spaces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the
indestructible memorial