Paleoindian, East Asian and Siberian components of the Eskimo oral traditions

The possibility to use analytical units extracted from traditional narratives for the study of prehistoric migrations and contacts follows from the works of Franz Boas published bet­ween 1895 and 1915. In the 1920s, the priorities of American anthropology changed, so the folklore studies missed the opportunity to become a tool of historic research. Here we try to advance a project abandoned a hundred years ago. Our database consists of more than 80,000 abstracts of texts from all over the world and helps to determine the approximate time of spread of narrative episodes and mythological ideas. The study analyzes the parallels between the narrative motives of the Eskimo and motives collected outside of the Arctic. Since the Paleo-Eskimo are associated with the Denbigh flint complex, which appeared in Alaska about 3000 BC and, which is usually believed to descend from the Eas­tern Siberian Belkachi culture, it can be assumed that Siberian links must prevail in the narratives of the Eskimo. Instead, parallels for those episodes and images that typical for the Arctic are found mostly in South America. Apparently, these motives appeared in the New World during its initial peopling around 15,000 cal. BC. The narrative analogies between the Arctic and the East Asia are less numerous and some of them are also found in South American traditions. The American parallels in Siberia are widespread among the Indians but not among the Eskimo. To date, only one episode of Eskimo tales with definite Siberian roots, namely “The Blind Hunter”, has been identified. Though possibly related to the Belkachi tradition, this motif is also typical for the Indians of the North American Northwest, one case recorded in South America. The Eskimo version is slightly different from the main one. It probably split from it in Alaska and was brought to Canada and Greenland by the Paleo-Eskimo or by the Inuit. The Eskimo oral traditions emerged in Alaska and in major part go back not to the Siberian language ancestors of the Eskimo and Aleuts but to the local substratum.