Study of a giant skull.The cave in question lies near Lanang, on the east coast of Samar, on the bank of a river, it is said. It is, as the traveler reports, celebrated in the locality “on account of its depressed gigantic crania, without sutures.” The singular statement is made clear by means of a well-preserved example, which I lay before you. The entire cranium, including the face, is covered with a thick layer of sinter, which gives it the appearance of belonging to the class of skulls with Leontiasis ossea. It is, in fact, of good size, but through the incrustation it is increased to gigantic proportions. It is true, likewise, that it has a much flattened, broad and compressed form. The cleaning of another skull has shown that artificial deformation has taken place, which obviously was completed before the incrustation was laid on by the mineral water of the cave. I will here add that on the testimony of travelers no Negritos were on Samar. The island lies in the neighborhood of the Bisayas. Although no description of the position of the skull is at hand and of the skeleton to which it apparently belonged, it must be assumed that the dead man was not laid away in a coffin, but placed on the ground; that, in fact, he belonged to an earlier “period.” How long ago that was can not be known, unfortunately, since no data are at hand; however, the bones are in a nearly fossilized condition, which allows the conclusion that they were deposited long ago.
The deformation itself furnishes no clue to a chronological conclusion. In Thévenot is found the statement that, according to the account of a priest, probably in the 16th century, the custom prevails in some of the islands to press the heads of new-born babes between two boards, also to flatten the forehead, “since they believed that this form was a special mark of beauty.” A similar deformation, with more pronounced flattening and backward pressure of the forehead, is shown on the crania which Jagor produced from a cave at Caramuan in Luzon. There are modes of flattening which remind one of Peru. When they came into our hands it was indeed an immense surprise, since no knowledge of such deformation in the South Sea was at hand. First our information led to more thorough investigations; so we are aware of several examples of it from Indonesia and, indeed, from the South Sea (Mallicolo). However, this deformation furnishes no clue to the antiquity of the graves.
(Chinese and Korean pottery are said to have been found with the deformed crania. Similar deformations exist in the Celebes, New Britain, etc. Head-shaping has been universal, cf. A. B. Meyer, Ueber Kunstliche deformirte Schaedel von Borneo und Mindanao und ueber die Verbreitung der Sitte der Kunstlichen Schaedeldeformirung, 1881, 36 pp., 4.°—Translator.)
I have sawed one of these skulls in two along the sagittal suture. The illustration gives a good idea of the amount of compression and of the violence which this skull endured when quite young. The cranial cavity is inclined backward and lengthened, and curves out above, while the occiput is pressed downward and the region of the front fontanelle is correspondingly lacking. Likewise, a considerable thickness of the bone is to be noted, especially of the vertex. The upper jaw is slightly prognathous and the roof of the mouth unusually arched.
For the purpose of the present study, it is unnecessary to go further into particulars. It might be mentioned that all Lanang skulls are characterized by their size and the firmness of bone, so that they depart widely from the characteristics of the other Philippine examples known to me. Similar skulls have been received only from caves, which exist in one of the little rocky islands east from Luzon. They suggest most Kanaka crania from Hawaii, and Moriori crania from Chatham islands, and they raise the question whether they do not belong to a migration period long before the time of the Malays. I have, on various occasions, mentioned this probable pre-Malayan, or at least proto-Malayan, population which stands in nearest relation to the settling of Polynesia. Here I will merely mention that the Polynesian sagas bring the progenitor from the west, and that the passage between Halmahera (Gilolo) and the Philippines is pointed out as the course of invasion.
At any rate, it is quite probable that the skulls from Lanang, Cragaray, and other Philippine Islands are the remains of a very old, if not autochthonous, prehistoric layer of population. The present mountain tribes have furnished no close analogies. As to the Igorots, which Blumentritt attributes to the first invasion, I refer to my description given on the ground of chronological investigations; according to the account given by Hans Meyer the disposal of the dead in log coffins and in caves still goes on. Of the skulls themselves, none were brachycephalous; on the contrary, they exhibit platyrrhine and in part decidedly pithecoid noses. On the whole, I came to the conclusion, as did earlier Quatrefages and Hamy, that Indications of pre-Malay invasion.“they stand next in comparison with the Dayaks of Borneo,” but I hold yet the impression that they belong to a very old, probably pre-Malay, immigration.
When, on the 18th of March, 1897, I made a communication on the population of the Philippines, a bloody uprising had broken out everywhere against the existing Spanish rule. In this uprising a certain portion of the population, and indeed that which had the most valid claim to aboriginality, the so-called Negritos, were not involved. Their isolation, their lack of every sort of political, often indeed of village organization, also their meager numbers, render it conceivable that the greatest changes might go on among their neighbors without their taking such a practical view of them as to lead to their engaging in them. Thus it can be understood how they would take no interest in the further development of the affair.
Since then the result of the war between Spain and the Americans has been the destruction of Spanish power, and the treaty of Paris brought the entire Philippine Archipelago into the possession of the United States of America. Henceforth the principal interest is centered upon the deportment of the insurgents, who have not only outlived the great war between the powers, but are now determined to assert, or win, their independence from the conquerors. These insurgents, who for brevity are called Filipinos, belong, as I have remarked, to the light-colored race of so-called Indios, who are sharply differentiated from the Negritos. Their ethnological position is difficult to fix, since numerous mixtures have taken place with immigrant whites, especially with Spaniards, but also with people of yellow and of brown races—that is, with Mongols and Chinese. Perhaps here and there the importance of this mixture on the composite type of the Indios has been overestimated; at least in most places positive proof is not forthcoming that foreign blood has imposed itself upon the bright-colored population. Both history and tradition teach, on the contrary, as also the study of the physical peculiarities of the people that among the various tribes differences exist which suggest family traits. To this effect is the testimony of several travelers who have followed one another during a long period of time, as has been developed especially by Blumentritt.
All immigrations from the West.In this connection it must not be overlooked that all these immigrations, howsoever many they be supposed to have been, must have come this way from the west. Indeed, a noteworthy migration from the east is entirely barred out, if we look no farther back than the Chinese and Japanese. On the contrary, all signs point to the assumption that from of old, long before the coming of Portuguese and Spaniards, a strong movement had gone on from this region to the east, and that the great sea way which exists between Mindanao and the Sulu islands on the north and Halmahera and the Moluccas in the south was the entrance road along which those tribes, or at least those navigators whose arrival peopled the Polynesian Islands, found their way into the Pacific Ocean. But also the movement of the Polynesians points to the west, and if their ancestors may have come from Indonesia there is no doubt that in their long journeys eastward they must have touched at the coasts of other islands on their way, especially the Philippines. Polynesian invasions of the Philippines are not supposed to have closed when a migration of peoples or of men passing out to the Pacific Ocean laid the foundation of a large fraction of the population of the archipelago. It is known that now and then single canoes from the Pelew or the Ladrone Islands were driven upon the east coast of Luzon, but their importance ought not to be overestimated. The migration this way from the west must henceforth remain as the point of departure for all explanations of this eastern ethnology. (These statements are well enough for working hypotheses, but actual proofs are not at hand. Ratzel, Berl. Verhandl., etc., Phil. Hist. Class, 1898, I., p. 33.—Translator.)
Now, how are the local differences of various tribes to be explained, when on the whole the place of origin was the same? Is there here a secondary variation of the type, something brought about through climate, food, circumstances? It is a large theme, which, unfortunately, is too often dominated by previously-formed theories. The importance of “environment” and mode of life upon the corporeal development of man can not be contested, but the measure of this importance is very much in doubt. Nowhere is this measure, at least in the present consideration, less known than in the Philippines. In spite of wide geological and biological differences on these islands, there exists a close anthropological agreement of the Indios in the chief characteristics, and the effort to trace back the tribal differences that have been marked to climatic and alimentary causes has not succeeded. The influence of inherited peculiarities is also more mighty here, as in most parts of the earth, than that of “milieu.”