Man, Past and PresentKeane, A. H. (Augustus Henry)
History
Man, Past and Present
Keane, A. H. (Augustus Henry)
Anthropology; Ethnology
9. Here, therefore, by _Papuans_ will be understood the true aborigines
of New Guinea with its eastern Louisiade dependency[321], and in the
west many of the Malaysian islands as far as Flores inclusive, where the
black element and non-Malay speech predominate; by _Melanesians_, the
natives of Melanesia as commonly understood, that is, the Admiralty
Isles, New Britain, New Ireland and Duke of York; the Solomon Islands;
Santa Cruz; the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Loyalty, and Fiji, where
the black element and Austronesian speech prevail almost exclusively.
PAPUASIA will thus comprise the insular world from Flores to New
Caledonia.
Such appear to be the present limits of the Papuasian domain, which
formerly may have included Micronesia also (the Marianne, Pelew, and
Caroline groups), and some writers suggest that it possibly extended
over the whole of Polynesia as far as Easter Island.
The variation in the inhabitants of New Guinea has often been recognised
and is well described by C. G. Seligman who remarks[322] that the
contrast between the relatively tall, dark-skinned, frizzly-haired
inhabitants of Torres Straits, the Fly River and the neighbouring parts
of New Guinea on the one hand, and the smaller lighter coloured peoples
to the east, is so striking that the two peoples must be recognised as
racially distinct. He restricts the name Papuan to the congeries of
frizzly-haired and often mop-headed peoples whose skin colour is some
shade of brownish black, and proposes the term Papuo-Melanesian for the
generally smaller, lighter coloured, frizzly-haired races of the eastern
peninsula and the islands beyond. Besides these conspicuous differences
"The Papuan is generally taller and is more consistently dolichocephalic
than the Papuo-Melanesian: he is always darker, his usual colour being a
dark chocolate or sooty brown; his head is high and his face, is, as a
rule, long with prominent brow-ridges, above which his rather flat
forehead commonly slopes backwards. The Papuo-Melanesian head is usually
less high and the brow ridges less prominent, while the forehead is
commonly rounded and not retreating. The skin colour runs through the
whole gamut of shades of _cafe-au-lait_, from a lightish yellow with
only a tinge of brown, to a tolerably dark bronze colour. The lightest
shades are everywhere uncommon, and in many localities appear to be
limited to the female sex. The Papuan nose is longer and stouter and is
often so arched as to present the outline known as 'Jewish.' The
character of its bridge varies, typically the nostrils are broad and the
tip of the nose is often hooked downwards. In the Papuo-Melanesian the
nose is generally smaller: both races have frizzly hair, but while this
is universal among Papuans, curly and even wavy hair is common among
both [Eastern and Western] divisions of Papuo-Melanesians[323]."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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