The Negritos are very alert physically, being remarkably fleet of foot, while they can climb like monkeys. They live in groups of about fifty families, shelter being obtained by a simple erection of sloping poles and leaves, though in their more settled locations they built bamboo huts like those of the Malays. They are a short-lived race, seldom living more than forty years. Mentally, they are stupid and apparently incapable of improvement, seeming to stand at the foot of the human scale. Attempts to instruct them have been made, but all proved failures. Efforts to make agriculturists of them have proved similarly futile. They are hereditarily hunters, and hunters they are likely to remain.
The only Eastern locality of which the Pygmy race remained in full possession until recent times is that of the Andaman Islands. This is no longer the case. Great Britain made a penal settlement of these islands after the mutiny in India, and as a consequence the Mincopies, as their native inhabitants are called, have begun to disappear. These islanders are rather taller than the Philippine Negritos, ranging from four and a half to five feet in height, but otherwise there is a somewhat close resemblance between them. Their color is dark brown or black, their hair woolly, and inclined to grow in tufts, like that of the Bushmen. The head, though large in proportion to the body, is really very small and of low cranial capacity. That of the men is only 1244 cubic centimetres, as contrasted with 1554 cubic centimetres of a large number of male Parisians measured by Broca. That of the women differs in the same proportion. Flower says that the Mincopies rank lowest among the human races in this respect; but it must be remembered that the brain usually decreases in size with decrease in stature.
Small as these islanders are, however, their strength is relatively great. They use with ease bows which the strongest English sailors cannot string, though practice may have much to do with this facility. And they can send arrows with a force that seems out of accord with their size. Their agility is remarkable. Travellers speak of the speed of the bullet in describing their running—doubtless with some exaggeration. Their senses are strikingly acute. It is said that they can distinguish fruits by their odor when hidden in the foliage of the jungle, and have wonderful powers of sight and hearing. As in the case of the Aetas, their life is short, though the age of puberty is nearly as great as with us. Fifty is extreme old age with these people, and twenty-two is said to be their average length of life.
Mentally, they are at a low level, the lowest, in the opinion of Owen, among the races of mankind. In counting they have words for only one and two, but can count up to ten by touching the nose with each of the fingers in succession, saying each time, "this one also." Their language is of a primitive type, and in various respects they manifest low intelligence. Yet, as in the case of the Akkas mentioned, they can be taught to the level of other children of twelve or fourteen years. Their mind, in the opinion of Dr. Brander, seems rather to be asleep than incapable. One child was taught to read and write, and to speak English fluently, and gained some knowledge of arithmetic; and this was not an exceptional case.
It does not seem at all remarkable, when we consider the ease with which monkeys can be taught many arts and acts new to them, that those dwarfish men, like other savages, greatly superior as they are in brain power to the apes, should be capable of acquiring the minor elements of education. It is not what they can be taught, but what they have taught themselves, that we must consider in assigning them to their comparative place in intellectual development. In this respect the Mincopies are on a very low plane. They have not even acquired the art of making a fire, though this is almost universal with mankind. All they know is how to keep a fire alive, and in this they are very assiduous. It is probable that they may have obtained fire at first from volcanoes on neighboring islands.
They are lacking, like the Pygmy races in general, in the art of chipping stone, one of the earliest arts acquired by man. Their only means of shaping stone is to put it into the fire until it breaks or splinters, when they can use the sharp splinters for their purposes. They are quite destitute of the art of drawing, and have no means of communicating their thoughts except by speech.
Yet with these deficiencies, they have made some progress in the industrial arts. They make wooden vessels, and can produce pottery which stands the fire and in which they cook most of their food. They make nets of considerable size, which they use to fish with in the narrow streams. They have arrows and harpoons, whose points are fastened to the shaft by a long cord. The fish or land animal struck unwinds this cord in trying to get away, and its speed being checked by the shaft which it drags along, it is easily caught.
The Mincopies possess boats, and these seem to have been early possessions of the Negrito populations, by whose aid they were able to migrate from island to island. Their canoes have nautical qualities which have astonished English sailors. At one time they were probably bold and daring fishermen and navigators, until driven to the forests and mountains by the invasion of the Malays.
As the Pygmies were in all probability the aborigines of Africa, so the Negritos appear to have been the aboriginal people of the Eastern islands, if not of India. Quatrefages, in his work "The Pygmies," finds reason to believe that even at the present day traces of them, pure or mixed, can be found from southeast New Guinea to the Andaman Islands, and from the Sunda Islands to Japan. On the continent their range extends, according to him, "from Annam and the peninsula of Malacca to the western Ghauts, and from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas."
In one part of India the Negrito-like population are called Bander-lokh (literally "man-ape") by the neighboring tribes. The Semangs of Malacca are jet-black in color, with thick lips, flat nose, and protruding abdomen. In regard to the characteristic of prognathism, it is possessed in various degrees, the most pronounced instance being seen in the photograph of one of the Kalangs of Java, a tribe which has recently become extinct. The face of this individual is strikingly ape-like in profile.