Recent investigation has identified as offshoots of this retarded Shoshonean stock the sedentary agriculturalists of the Moqui Pueblo, and the advanced populations of ancient Mexico and Central America.[135] Here was a great human current which through the centuries slowly drifted from the present frontier of Canada to the shores of Lake Nicaragua.

Powell's map of the distribution of the linguistic stocks of American Indians is intelligible only in the light of constant mobility.

Haebler's map of the South American stocks reveals the same restless past.

This cartographical presentation of the facts, giving only the final results, suggests tribal excursions of the nature of migrations; but ethnologists see them as the sum total of countless small movements which are more or less part of the normal activity of an unrooted savage people.

[Map page 101.] Otis Mason finds that the life of a social group involves a variety of movements characterized by different ranges or scopes.