Pioneers in Australasia

by Harry Johnston

At some date of unknown remoteness—it may be a hundred or two hundred thousand years ago—a primitive type of man entered the island continent of Australia, coming from New Guinea and the islands of the Malay Archipelago. The period in human history was perhaps so distant from our days that the geographical conditions of the Malay Archipelago were not precisely what they are at the present day; islands now separated by shallow seas may have been joined one to the other, the southern projections of New Guinea and the northern peninsulas of Australia may have been much closer together, so that men, though living a life of absolute savagery representing the lowest grade of human intelligence, were nevertheless able, by making use of floating logs or roughly fashioned rafts,[10] to enter the Australian continent and to pass from New Guinea eastwards and southwards into the nearer archipelagos of the Pacific. Although, doubtless, changes have taken place during the last hundred thousand years in regard to the distribution of land and water between south-eastern Asia and Australia, and even over the surface of the Pacific Ocean; and although islands or islets may have since subsided that once served as stepping-stones for adventurous savages: nevertheless there cannot have been within this period of time—which is scarcely a second in the age of the planet on which we dwell—the rise of any continuous land surface between the continent of Asia and the great Malay islands, on the one hand; and New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Fiji, on the other. Because if there had been any such continuous land connection within the last two hundred thousand years, sufficient to effect the peopling of Australasia by the human species without the need of crossing straits and narrow seas, there would have come into these regions as well as Man many examples of the modern animals of Asia. But, as we know, the south-eastern part of the Malay Archipelago and all Australasia and the Pacific islands are singularly deficient in the types of mammal now existing in Asia. In New Guinea, Australia, and the Malay islands to the east of Celebes and Bali, there are no monkeys, cats, wild oxen, or deer (excepting in the Moluccas and Timor), no apes, bears, insectivores, squirrels, elephants, rhinoceroses, or tapirs. Elephants, tapirs, apes, tigers, and rhinoceroses got as far east as Java (though the two first are now extinct there), and if there had been continuous land connection from that region eastwards to New Guinea and Australia, which made human emigration thither possible without crossing the sea, then these other large mammals would have equally invaded Papuasia and Australia. That they did not penetrate farther east than Java shows that a broad sea strait must have intervened, and the fact that this strait—or rather a succession of straits—-did not prevent the Tasmanians, the Negroes of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, and the aboriginal Australians from reaching the lands in which the Europeans found them living three hundred years ago, shows that when they set out on these migrations from Malaysia eastward they could not have been without some knowledge of human arts and inventions, since they must have been able to fashion and use forms of transport across broad stretches of sea, such as logs or reeds fastened together into rafts, or water-tight vessels made out of the bark casing of fallen tree trunks.

AN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINE NAVIGATING A RAFT

Nevertheless, though of the same human species as ourselves, the Australoids[11] and Tasmanians[12] belonged to the lowliest living types of mankind, both physically and mentally. We know from various researches and evidence of cave deposits, bone and shell heaps, that these races had inhabited Australia and Tasmania for a very long period, that they did not originate in the southern continent, but evidently came from Asia; and that their nearest relations at the present day are the savage forest tribes of India and Ceylon, and in the past—most wonderful to relate—the ancient races of Britain and the continent of Europe. In his skull features and his very simple handicraft the Tasmanian resembled closely the people who lived in Kent and north-eastern France one to two hundred thousand years ago, in the warm intervals of the Great Ice Age. When races of superior intellect and bodily strength were developed in Europe and northern Asia, the ancestors of the Tasmanians and the Australoids were driven forth into the forests of Africa and southern Asia. From out of the Tasmanian type was specialized the Negro of Africa and southern Asia. But the unspecialized Tasmanian meantime was either extinguished by stronger races or was pushed on, ever farther and farther eastwards and southwards, until first Australia, and lastly what was once the southernmost peninsula of Australia—Tasmania—was his last refuge. The Australoids followed in the Tasmanian's footsteps, and became the native race of the Australian continent, prevented or discouraged from crossing over into Tasmania by the sea passage—Bass's Straits—which had been formed between Tasmania and the mainland. Other Australoids and Tasmanians no doubt populated New Guinea and the great Melanesian islands (as they had done all Malaysia). Here, however, they were followed up by the Negro, and in course of time Papuasia (as New Guinea and its surrounding islands is called) became almost as much a domain of the Negro as Africa. Primitive Negroes (mixed in blood with Australoids, and forming thus the Melanesian type) travelled as far eastwards and south as Fiji, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia. They may even have reached New Zealand before the Polynesian Maoris came, and in a half-breed with the Polynesian they extended their ocean range as far as the Hawaii archipelago. They populated the Philippine Islands,[13] and all the other islands of the Malay Archipelago, even as far out at sea as Micronesia, except—curiously enough—Borneo, and perhaps Java.

The Negroes or Melanesians improved on the rafts and bark canoes of the Tasmanians and Australoids by inventing and perfecting the "dug-out" canoe. This is made of a single tree trunk, hollowed out by the use of fire and the chipping of stone axes.

In Micronesia and Malaysia these Negroids soon became mixed with or exterminated by the early Mongolian type of man which, originating somewhere in High Asia, invaded Europe, America, south-east Asia, and Malaysia, assisting in time to form that race of mysterious origin and affinities, the Indonesian or Polynesian, whose invasion of the Malay Archipelago and Pacific islands occurred long after the coming of Tasmanian, Australoid, Negro, and Mongol, yet may have been as far back as five or six thousand years ago. The Polynesian's ancestors produced very considerable effects on these regions by bringing to them the first fruits of the white man's civilization which we associate in Europe and western Asia with the New Stone Age, or the period beginning perhaps twenty thousand years ago, in which men began to make beautifully finished stone and bone implements and set themselves to domesticate animals and to cultivate plants.

Among the Maoris of New Zealand, the people of Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, one or two islands off the west and the north-east of New Guinea, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), there are, or rather were, types amongst the Polynesians, strikingly European in form, feature, and mental characteristics. I write "were" with the intention of alluding to the days when there were no European settlers in these regions who could have modified the population by intermarriage. The languages spoken at the present day by all more or less pure-blood Polynesians betray a resemblance and affinity with the Malay dialects and languages of Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula. It would seem, therefore, as though Malaysia was the original home of development of the Polynesian race, and that this remarkable people, celebrated for their fearless navigation of the ocean in well-constructed canoes, with masts, sails, and outriggers,[14] arose from some southward migration of the White Man (Caucasian) when he was emerging from the condition of the savage into the beginnings of civilization; a stage which is understood by the use of the term Neolithic, or the stage of perfected stone implements. Here in Malaysia the Caucasian type (which in ancient times populated much of northern and eastern Asia) mixed with the Mongol or Yellow Man, with the Negro or Black Man, and perhaps even with what remained of the generalized Australoid stock; and the result was the Polynesian as he is seen to-day: a tall, well-developed specimen of humanity with a reddish or yellow skin, large eyes set horizontally in the head, a well-formed nose and chin, straight hair (finer than that of the Mongol and with some tendency to curl or undulate), slight beards in the men, and a good brain development. In some respects these Polynesians recall in appearance, in mind, and in culture the aboriginal inhabitants of the three Americas, North, Central, and South. Indeed, if natives from the Upper Amazon, Southern Chili, or California were put alongside Polynesians from New Zealand, Tahiti, or Samoa it would not always be easy to pick them out at a glance. Where the Amerindian differs from the Polynesian is in being absolutely straight-haired and having features slightly more Mongolian, so that there is a still greater resemblance in body and mind between the Amerindian of South America and the Micronesians of the Ladrone Islands, the Dayaks of Borneo, or the Malays of the Malay Peninsula. The indigenes of North America obviously contain a great deal of Caucasian blood, from ancient migrations coming from north-east Asia, and therefore sometimes resemble Polynesians more than they do the Mongols of northern Asia.

Many students of the unwritten history of the human past are now inclined to believe that by the aid of islands since submerged individuals of the Malay and the Polynesian races must have penetrated in ancient times into Central and South America, carrying with them the beginnings of Neolithic culture and many new ideas in religion. Such theories derive some support from a comparison between the arts of Borneo and other islands of the Malay Archipelago, and of the Pacific islands and those of Central and South America.

Amongst the many problems of the past which we are unable at present to solve is why, if the Polynesians could colonize every island or islet in the vast Pacific, including New Zealand and Easter Island, they should have had so little effect on the development of Australia. In travelling east and south from their original homes in Sumatra, Jilolo, and the islands north of New Guinea, the Polynesians might just as easily have landed on the coasts of Australia as on those of New Zealand. But though such landings almost certainly took place, nearly all record of them is lost, and they had very little effect on the physical and mental character of the dark-skinned Australian aborigines. As a matter of fact, for some reasons connected with ocean currents and prevailing winds, the line of Polynesian migration seems to have been from west to east across the more equatorial regions of the Pacific, north of New Guinea, and afterwards from east to west, north-west, south-west, and due north. New Zealand was colonized by the Polynesians, not from the direction of New Caledonia, but from Samoa and Tonga. These Maoris (as they are now called) came at no very ancient date—perhaps not more than six hundred years ago;[15] but there may have been earlier Melanesian invasions from the direction of Fiji.