journalist, in most cases it is intended to refer to the racial components in a given territory; in other words, it is used in the sense in which the scientific writer would employ the word anthropology. For instance, when the endeavour was made in the earlier part of the nineteenth century to liberate the Greeks from Turkish dominion, the plea was put forward that they differed in race; and the delimitation of the territory of the Greek state was claimed on what was called 'the ethnological basis', the geographical distribution of people of Greek nationality. Even since then, and especially during the European War and the subsequent attempt at a settlement, claims have been put forward to fix the boundaries of Italy, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, &c., on the basis of race and nationality. But further confusion arises from the attempt to apply this anthropological or ethnological test in deciding whether physical type, language, religion, or social traditions and usages are to be the test of nationality. In this article it will be convenient to give the term ethnology its widest meaning, and to consider not merely the customs, beliefs, and institutions of various peoples, but also the early history of the human family, its differentiation into races and the significance of their geographical distribution, and the different phases of culture which are found in the various communities even of the same race.
As restored by Dr. Smith Woodward and Mr. Frank O'Barlow. The dark portions are those actually recovered.
During the last eighty years the discovery of a series of fossilized remains of extinct genera and species of the human family and of apes has given us a glimpse of the origin and early history of mankind. Man's ancestors probably parted company with those of the anthropoid apes somewhere in the neighbourhood of Northern India early in the Miocene period; and before the close of the Pliocene period their descendants had gradually acquired the highly developed brain and the intelligence which imply the emergence of the distinctively human characteristics. The most significant token of the attainment of the status of men was the acquisition of the power of speech, which enabled its possessors to hand on the accumulated knowledge and the fruits of experience, and so enormously to increase their powers. The earliest-known representative of the human family was the Ape-man, Pithecanthropus, who at the end of the Pliocene period wandered east as far as Java, where the fossilized remains of a skull were found thirty years ago by Professor Eugen Dubois. At a later date a much more highly developed type, one, moreover, that was much closer to the ancestry of modern men than the aberrant Ape-man of Java, wandered as far west as England, where a representative of this extinct genus was discovered by the late Mr. Charles Dawson in 1912 at Piltdown, in Sussex. This very primitive member of the human family has been called the 'Dawn-man' or Eoanthropus by Dr. Smith Woodward. He has a brain which, though poorly developed, is definitely human, but his face (and especially the jaws) retains considerable resemblance to that of an ape. Of the other fossilized remains of extinct varieties of the human family, the most important are those known respectively as Heidelberg man and Neanderthal man. The former is almost as old as the Piltdown man, and its former existence was revealed by the discovery in the Mauer Sands, near Heidelberg, in 1908, of a very massive and chinless jaw. At a much later date Europe was inhabited by a brutal species of mankind, Neanderthal man, which became extinct when in the Neoanthropic Age men of our own species made their way into Europe and completely superseded the less efficient Neanderthal species. The latter were men of vast strength, with short, clumsy, thick-set limbs, a stooping gait, thick neck, and a great flattened head with a coarse face. These people inhabited Europe in the days when the elephant and the woolly rhinoceros lived there; they made the rough stone implements known as Mousterian. But, in spite of their enormous strength, these people were not able to hold their own in competition with the nimbler wits and the more skilled hands of Homo sapiens, who introduced into Europe a more finished technique in making implements, and revealed his genius and manual dexterity in the remarkable pictures which he painted on the walls of caves, especially in Southern France and Northern Spain. We have no information concerning the place of origin or the course of the wanderings of these earliest members of our own species.
But an extremely primitive race has survived until the present time to demonstrate the original type of Homo sapiens. The aboriginal Australian, like all existing races of men, belongs to the same species as ourselves, but it represents with singularly little modification the original type and colouring of Homo sapiens. Fossilized remains of the proto-Australian race have been found in Queensland (at Talgai) and in Java (at Wadjak); but the wandering of the race from its original Asiatic centre of characterization
is indicated by the survival of remnants of this people in the pre-Dravidian jungle tribes of India (mainly in the Deccan), the Vedda of Ceylon, the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula, the Toala of Celebes, and other peoples of the Malay Archipelago, whose existence blazes the track from India to Australia.
The Australian race is on the average about 5 feet 2 inches in height; their skin is dark-brown or black; hair black and wavy or curly; skull typically long (dolichocephalic), with a relatively small brain-case; the nose is flat and broad, and the jaws large and prominent. What lowly culture these people now possess has been mainly acquired within relatively recent times by contact with more civilized peoples.
Long after the proto-Australians separated from the rest of mankind and wandered east, another group wandered west, and, probably in tropical Africa, became specialized in structure to become the Negro race. The negro, like the Australian, retains many primitive characters, such as the black skin, and the small brain, but in other respects, such, for example, as the extremely flattened and curved hair ('pepper-corns'), he has become highly specialized and sharply differentiated from all other varieties of mankind. At an early period in the history of the race the negro divided into two groups—a pygmy variety or Negrillo, and the ordinary tall negro. One of the branches of the pygmy stock became further specialized in structure (in the course of which the black colour of the skin was lost), and became the Bushman race which has gradually been pushed into the deserts of South Africa (see Hottentot).
After the differentiation of the Negro race into pygmy and tall varieties, representatives of both divisions spread along the southern coast of Asia, the former, known in the East as Negritos, reaching the Andaman Islands, the Malay Peninsula (Semangs), the Philippines (Aetas), and New Guinea (Pygmies), and the taller Negroids to Melanesia, New Guinea, and the neighbouring islands of the Malay Archipelago. Many authorities regard the extinct Tasmanian people as a branch of this race.