Dr. Ales Hrdlicka believes that the aboriginal races of North and South America were of the same stock.  The wide differences in physiognomy observable among the different tribes in North and South America are perhaps due to their environmental history during the past 10,000 or 20,000 years.  Mr. Frank Chapman, of the American Museum of Natural History, has pointed out the interesting biological fact that animals and birds found at sea level in the cold regions of Tierra del Fuego, while not found at sea level in Peru, do exist at very high altitudes, where the climate is similar to that with which they are acquainted.  Similarly, it is interesting to learn that the inhabitants of the cold, lofty regions of southern Peru, living in towns and villages at altitudes of from 9000 to 14,000 feet above the sea, have physical peculiarities closely resembling those living at sea level in Tierra del Fuego, Alaska, and Labrador.  Dr. Ferris says the Labrador Eskimo and the Quichua constitute the two “best-known short-stature races on the American continent.”

So far as we could learn by questions and observation, about one quarter of the Quichuas are childless.  In families which have children the average number is three or four.  Large families are not common, although we generally learned that the living children in a family usually represented less than half of those which had been born.  Infant mortality is very great.  The proper feeding of children is not understood and it is a marvel how any of them manage to grow up at all.

Coughs and bronchial trouble are very common among the Indians.  In fact, the most common afflictions of the tableland are those of the throat and lungs.  Pneumonia is the most serious and most to be dreaded of all local diseases.  It is really terrifying.  Due to the rarity of the air and relative scarcity of oxygen, pneumonia is usually fatal at 8000 feet and is uniformly so at 11,000 feet.  Patients are frequently ill only twenty-four hours.  Tuberculosis is fairly common, its prevalence undoubtedly caused by the living conditions practiced among the highlanders, who are unwilling to sleep in a room which is not tightly closed and protected against any possible intrusion of fresh air.  In the warmer valleys, where bodily comfort has led the natives to use huts of thatch and open reeds, instead of the air-tight hovels of the cold, bleak plateau, tuberculosis is seldom seen.  Of course, there are no “boards of health,” nor are the people bothered by being obliged to conform to any sanitary regulations.  Water supplies are so often contaminated that the people have learned to avoid drinking it as far as possible.  Instead, they eat quantities of soup.

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Figure

The Ruins of the Temple of Viracocha at Racche
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In the market-place of Sicuani, the largest town in the valley, and the border-line between the potato-growing uplands and lowland maize fields, we attended the