Alaska to Panama, except in California. These
distinguishing features of an incipient culture are found nowhere else
in North America, even sporadically. Dall therefore concludes that "they
have been impressed upon the American aboriginal world from without,"
and on the ground of affinities, attributes their origin to
Oceanica.[780]

Cyrus Thomas, on the basis of the character and distribution of the
archeological remains in North America, concurs in this opinion. He
finds that these remains fall into two classes, one east of the Rocky
Mountain watershed and the other west. "When those of the Pacific slope
as a whole are compared with those of the Atlantic slope, there is a
dissimilarity which marks them as the products of different races or as
the result of different race influences." He emphasizes the resemblance
of the customs, arts and archeological remains of the west coast to
those of the opposite shores and islands of the Pacific, and notes the
lack of any resemblance to those of the Atlantic; and finally leans to
the conclusion that the continent was peopled from two sources, one
incoming stream distributing itself over the Atlantic slope, and the
other over the Pacific, the two becoming gradually fused into a
comparatively homogeneous race by long continental isolation. Yet these
two sources may not necessarily include a trans-Atlantic origin for one
of the contributing streams; ethnic evidence is against such a
supposition, because the characteristics of the American race and of the
archeological remains point exclusively to affinity with the people of
the Pacific.[781] John Edward Payne also reaches the same conclusion,
though on other grounds.[782]

[Sidenote: Lack of segregated districts.]

The one strong segregating feature in primitive America was the
Cordilleras, which held east and west apart. In the natural pockets
formed by the high intermontane valleys of the Andes and the Anahuac
Plateau, and in the constricted isthmian region, the continent afforded
a few secluded localities where civilization found favorable conditions
of development. But in general, the paucity of large coast
articulations, and the adverse polar or subpolar location of most of
these, the situation of the large tropical islands along that barren
Atlantic abyss, and the lack of a broken or varied relief, have
prevented the Americas from developing numerous local centers of
civilization, which might eventually have lifted the cu