The Andamanese make three kinds of simple huts on the ground and large communal huts are sometimes built. The Semang construct “bee-hive” and long communal huts and weather screens similar to those of the Andamanese. They also erect tree shelters, but direct evidence is very scanty that pure Semang inhabit huts with a flooring raised on piles; they sleep on bamboo platforms. The Aeta usually make very simple huts sometimes with a raised bamboo sleeping platform inside. The pile dwellings of the Tapiro have evidently been copied from those of other tribes in the interior. The Mafulu build a different kind of pile dwelling which has a peculiar hood-like porch.
All the Negritos have the bow and arrow. The Great Andamanese bow is peculiar while that of the Little Andamanese appears to resemble that of the Semang. The Great Andamanese and the Tapiro have very long bows. Harpoon arrows with iron points are used by the Andamanese and Aeta, the arrows of the Andamanese, Semang and Aeta are nocked, but only those of the two latter are feathered. No nocked or feathered arrows occur in New Guinea. Only the Semang and Aeta are known to poison their arrows, and they may have borrowed the idea from the poisoned darts of the blow-pipe. Some Semang have adopted the blow-pipe.
The Andamanese appear to be one of the very few people who possess fire but do not know how to make it afresh. The Semang usually make fire by “rubbing together short blocks of wood, bamboo or cane. A common method consists in passing a rattan line round the portion of a dried branch, and holding the branch down by the feet whilst the line is rapidly worked to and fro with the hands.” Flint and steel are also used. (The Sakai employ similar methods.) (Skeat and Blagden, I, pp. 111-114, 119.) Among the Aeta flint and steel have almost replaced the old method of making fire by one piece of split bamboo being sawed rapidly across another piece. Semper collected from Negritos of N.E. Luzon, a split stick, bark fibre and a strip of rattan used in fire-making, these are described and figured by A. B. Meyer (Publ. der K. Ethn. Mus. zu. Dresden, IX, Negritos, p. 5, pl. 11, fig. 7 a-c). It is interesting to find that the Tapiro employ the same method and apparatus (p. [200]). Thus there occurs among Negritos in the Philippines and New Guinea the method of making fire by partly splitting a dry stick, keeping the ends open by inserting a piece of wood or a stone in the cleft, stuffing some tinder into the narrow part of the slit and then drawing rapidly a strip of rattan to and fro across this spot till a spark ignites the tinder. Pöch found it among the Poum, dwelling in the mountains inland from the Kai (Geog. Jnl. XXX, 1907, p. 612, and Mitt. Anth. Ges. in Wien, XXXVII. 1907, p. 59, fig. 2, 3). Precisely the same method was described by the Rev. Dr. W. G. Lawes who found it among the Koiari of Tabure on Mt. Warirata (Proc. R. Geog. Soc. V, 1883, p. 357). Finsch collected the apparatus from the same people (Ann. des K.K. naturhist. Hofmus. in Wien, III, 1888, p. 323; Leo Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, 1909, fig. 313, but Frobenius is mistaken in representing the rattan as going twice round the stick). Dr. H. O. Forbes had found it at Ubumkara on the Naoro, also in the Central Division (P.R.G.S. XII. 1890, p. 562). Mr. C. A. W. Monckton noticed it in 1906 among the Kambisa tribe, in the valley of the Chirima, Mt. Albert Edward (Ann. Rep. Brit. New Guinea, 1907). Pöch suggests that N. von Miklucho-Maclay was wrong in thinking that the strip was rubbed in the split of a stick (l.c. p. 61); this is the earliest Papuan record (1872).
From the above account it is possible that the split stick and rattan strip method of fire-making may be a criterion of Negrito culture, but it should be noted that the stick is not reported as split among the Semang, and that the unsplit stick is found among the Sakai and the Kayans and Kenyahs of Sarawak who are not Negritos. Also the split stick is found at several spots in the mountainous interior of the south-east peninsula of New Guinea where Negrito influence has not yet been recorded, but Mr. Williamson’s observations are very suggestive in this respect. Pöch (l.c. p. 62) points out that this method is nearest akin to “fire-sawing with bamboo, both in principle and distribution,” of which he gives details. A somewhat similar method is that described by W. E. Roth. A split hearth-stick is held by the feet, but fire is made by sawing with another piece of wood, a device which appears to be widely spread in Queensland and occurs also on the Lachlan River, N.S.W. (N. Queensland Ethnogr. Bull. 7, 1904, sect. 9, pl. II. figs. 17, 18).
So far as is known the social structure of the Negritos is very simple. Among the Andamanese there is no division of the community into two moieties, no clan system nor totemism, neither has a classificatory system of kinship been recorded; the social unit appears to be the family, and the power of the head-man is very limited. Our knowledge concerning the Semang and Aeta is extremely imperfect but they probably resemble the Andamanese in these points. The Andamanese and Semang are strictly monogamous, polygyny is allowed among the Aeta, but monogamy prevails. The only restriction at all on marriage appears to be the prohibition of marriage between near kindred, and divorce is very rare. All bury their dead, but it is considered by the Andamanese more complimentary to place the dead on a platform which is generally built in a large tree, and the more honourable practice of the Semang is to expose the dead in trees. The Mafulu bury ordinary people, but the corpses of chiefs are placed in an open box either on a platform or in the fork of a kind of fig tree. Nothing is known about the social life of the Tapiro, and Williamson says, “The very simple ideas of the Mafulu, as compared with the Papuans and Melanesians, in matters of social organization, implements, arts and crafts, religion and other things may well, I think, be associated with a primitive Negrito origin” (l.c. p. 306).
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY.
This is not the place to attempt to give a record of the very voluminous bibliography of the Negritos, and most of the works here recorded are those from which the foregoing facts have been collected. Books referred to in the text are, with one or two exceptions, not here repeated.
The General Question.