Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

I. The Negritic Stock.

This embraces three subdivisions, (1) the Negritos, (2) the Papuas, (3) the Melanesians.

1. The Negrito Group.

The Negritos may be called the western branch of the stock. It is noteworthy that they are located nearer to Africa, and that they more distinctly resemble the Negrillo stock of that continent than do the Papuas. To them belong the natives of the Andaman Islands known as Mincopies, the Semangs, Mantras, and Sakaies of Malacca, the Aetas of the Philippine Islands, and the Schobaengs of the Nicobar Isles.[149] It is highly probable that they inhabited a large part of Southern Hindostan, perhaps before it was united to the Himalayan highlands (see p. 88), and some have been reported in Formosa.

They are believed to have been the original possessors of Borneo, Java, Sumatra and the Celebes Islands, as well as parts of Indo-China; but except in some mixed tribes, as the Mois of the latter region, their stock has disappeared from those localities. It is noteworthy that not a trace of their blood has been found in Asia north of the Hindu Cush and Himalaya ranges.[150] Some writers have thought that they proceeded along the eastern islands as far north as the Japanese archipelago, and would explain some of the present physical traits of its inhabitants by an ancient infusion of Negritic blood.

In physical aspect they are of small stature, not more than one-fourth of the adult males reaching five feet in height; their color is black, hair woolly, nearly beardless, and the body smooth. The nose is flat, the face moderately prognathic, and the skull generally globular (mesocephalic index 80°-81°), but on the Philippines and in Indo-China rather dolichocephalic. Their forms are symmetrical, though they are thin-legged, without calves; their movements agile and graceful.[151]

They are averse to culture, and depend on hunting and fishing. As weapons, they know the bow and arrow, the lance, and the sarbacane or blow-pipe, but have not acquired the art of chipping stone. When they use that material, they split it by exposure to fire. They are timid and distrustful of strangers, and they well may be, as they have been pursued remorselessly by slave-catching pirates, and were constantly exposed to the brutal aggressions of their stronger neighbors.

The portrait presented of their tribal customs is rather pleasing. The social organization is based on the family, the heads of which elect the tribal chieftain, and their respect for the dead amounts to a religion. Beyond the ancestral worship they have few rites, though some ceremonies are performed to appease the evil spirits, and others at the time of full moon and thunderstorms, and at births and deaths. Among their myths is one relating to a mythical great serpent, who seems to be a beneficent deity, pointing out to them where game abounds, and where the bees have deposited wild honey. They are monogamous, and neither steal nor buy their wives, the lover arranging the matter with his chosen one, and then sending a present to her father. They have learned the luxury of tobacco, and prize it highly, but for alcoholic beverages they have no longing. As they are migratory, their house building is limited to shelters of light materials, and for clothing a breech-cloth is sufficient.[152]

In so many respects, geographical as well as physical, do these dwarfish blacks stand between the Negro peoples of Austafrica and Australasia that we are not surprised at the conclusion suggested by Prof. W. H. Flower, that they may be “the primitive type from which the African Negroes on the one hand, and the Melanesians on the other, may have sprung.”[153]

2. The Papuan Group

Is found in its purity on the great island of New Guinea and the chains east and west of it, but even there it discloses considerable diversity. In color the Papuas vary from a coal black to a dark brown, their hair is woolly, and there is considerable on the body and face, stature medium, legs thin. Their lips are thick, and the nostrils broad, but the nose is high and curved. Yet the best observers agree that they vary extremely in physiognomy, and that in New Guinea, tribes of equally pure blood have the skull sometimes broad, sometimes long. These variations we may attribute to the influence of insular conditions, or to some intermixture of blood.[154]

The Papuas belong to the lowest stages of culture. Some of their tribes do not know the bow and arrow, and few of them have any pottery. Their languages are agglutinating, but have this peculiarity, that the modifications of the root are generally by prefixes instead of suffixes, in this respect reminding one of the African rather than the Sibiric families of tongues.

Their territory includes parts of the New Hebrides, the Loyalty Isles, New Caledonia, Viti, and a variety of smaller groups. These islanders are usually of mixed type, and are known as “Melanesians.” The natives of the Feejee Islands are an excellent specimen of these, and their archipelago forms the dividing line between the Papuan and Polynesian groups.[155]

3. The Melanesian Group.

The Melanesians, of all the islanders, present in individual cases the strongest likeness to the equatorial African Negro; yet among these there is that prevailing variability of type so frequent in insular peoples. Their color passes from the black of the typical Negro to the yellow of the Malayan; their hair, generally frizzly, may be quite straight and of any hue from black to blonde. These variations are in individuals or families, and are not owing to mixed blood.[156]

Unlike the Polynesians, the Melanesians are agricultural in habits, and sedentary. They build artistically decorated houses, are acquainted with the bow and arrow, occasionally make pottery, and construct shapely canoes, though not given to long voyages. The women are modest and chaste, and their religion is principally a form of ancestral worship.

The languages of these islanders betray their compound origin. In form and in the pronominal elements they stand related to the Malayan and Polynesian idioms, and in structure approach sometimes the richness of the former. In the Viti, for example, both prefixes and suffixes are employed, and the possessive is added to the noun. The root words are monosyllables or dissyllables, and drawn from the Papuan idioms, and the phonetics are much richer than the Polynesian.

These facts go to show that the Melanesians are physically and linguistically a mixed people, a compound of the woolly-haired black Papuas, whom we may suppose to have been the aborigines of Melanesia, with the smooth-haired, light-colored Malays, who reached the archipelago as adventurers and immigrants. As their tongues form, as it were, the second stratum of structure when compared with the Polynesian dialects, we can go a step further and say that the ethnic formation of the Melanesian islanders occurred subsequently to the construction of the Polynesian physical type and languages.[157]

The ethnic relationship of the various adjoining islanders to the Papuas has been studied by many observers, but its solution has not yet been reached. The Papuas themselves impressed Hale as partly Malayan—“a hybrid race,”[158] and Virchow calls attention to the fact that a broad zone of wavy-haired peoples intervene between the Papuas and the pure Malays, shading off into the Australians on the one hand and the Veddahs of Ceylon on the other.[159] This is very significant of the ethnic origin of the inhabitants of Australasia.

It is borne out by an examination of the Papuan languages. These are quite dissimilar among themselves, and appear to have been derived from a number of independent linguistic stocks. While these were originally distinct from the Malayan, it is a recognized fact that all the Papuan, and still more all the Melanesian dialects, have absorbed extensively from Malayan and Polynesian sources, and we are certain, therefore, that a similar absorption of Malayan blood has taken place.[160]