Most striking of all is the diffusion of the Negro stocks with black
skin and woolly hair. Their range is certainly suggestive of a
breeding-ground somewhere about Indonesia. To the extreme west are
the negroes of Africa, to the extreme east the Papuasians (Papuans
and Melanesians) extending from New Guinea through the oceanic islands
as far as Fiji. A series of connecting links is afforded by the small
negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos. It is not known
how far they represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experiment in
negro-making, though this is the prevailing view; or whether the negro
type, with its tendency to infantile characters due to the early
closing of the cranial sutures, is apt to throw off dwarfed forms in
an occasional way. At any rate, in Africa there are several groups
of pygmies in the Congo region, as well as the Bushmen and allied stocks
in South Africa. Then the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of the Malay
Peninsula, the Aket of eastern Sumatra, the now extinct Kalangs of
Java, said to have been in some respects the most ape-like of human
beings, the Aetas of the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with a
surprisingly high culture, recently reported from Dutch New Guinea,
are like so many scattered pieces of human wreckage. Finally, if we
turn our gaze southward, we find that Negritos until the other day
inhabited Tasmania; whilst in Australia a strain of Negrito, or Negro
(Papuan), blood is likewise to be detected.
Are we here on the track of the original dispersal of man? It is
impossible to say. It is not even certain, though highly probable,
that man originated in one spot. If he did, he must have been
hereditarily endowed, almost from the outset, with an adaptability
to different climates quite unique in its way. The tiger is able to
range from the hot Indian jungle to the freezing Siberian tundra; but
man is the cosmopolitan animal beyond all others. Somehow, on this
theory of a single origin, he made his way to every quarter of the
globe; and when he got there, though needing time, perhaps, to acquire
the local colour, managed in the end to be at home. It looks as if
both race and a dash of culture had a good deal to do with his
exploitation of geographical opportunity. How did the Australians and
their Negrito forerunners invade their Austral world, at some period
which, we cannot but suspect, was immensely remote in time? Certain
at least it is that they crossed a formidable barrier. What is known
as Wallace's line corresponds with the deep channel running between
the islands of Bali and Lombok and continuing northwards to the west
of Celebes. On the eastern side the fauna are non-Asiatic. Yet somehow
into Australia with its queer monotremes and marsupials entered
triumphant man--man and the dog with him. Haeckel has suggested that
man followed the dog, playing as it were the jackal to him. But this
sounds rather absurd. It looks as if man had already acquired enough
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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