26. Negroid Races
The Negroid stock falls into two large divisions, the African Negro proper, and the Oceanic Melanesian; besides a third division, the Dwarf Blacks or Negritos, who are very few in numbers but possess a wide and irregular distribution. The Negroes and the Melanesians, in spite of their being separated by the breadth of the Indian Ocean, are clearly close relatives. A trained observer can distinguish them at sight, but a novice would take a Papuan from New Guinea or a Melanesian from the Solomon or Fiji Islands to be an African. Perhaps the most conspicuous difference is that the broad nose of the African Negro is flat, the broad nose of the Melanesian often aquiline. How these two so similar Negroid branches came to be located on the opposite sides of a great ocean is a fact that remains unexplained.
The Negrito or Dwarf Negroid race has representatives in New Guinea, in the Philippines, in the Malay Peninsula, in the Andaman Islands, and in equatorial Africa. These peoples are the true pygmies of the human species. Wherever they are racially pure the adult males are less than 5 feet in stature. They also differ from other Negroids in being relatively broad headed. Their skin color, hair texture, nose form, and most other traits are, however, the same as those of the other Negroids. Their scattered distribution is difficult to account for. It is possible that they are an ancient and primitive type which once inhabited much wider stretches of territory than now in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. On account of their inoffensiveness and backwardness, the Negritos, according to this theory, were gradually crowded to the wall by the larger, more energetic populations with which they came in contact, until only a few scattered fragments of them now remain.
The Bushmen and in some degree the Hottentots of South Africa may also be provisionally included with the Negritos, although distinctive in a number of respects. They are yellowish-brown in complexion, long headed, short and flat eared, short legged, hollow backed, and steatopygous. On the whole Negroid characteristics prevail among them. They are, for instance, frizzy-haired. Their extremely short stature may justify their tentative inclusion among the Negritos.