australia
were Native
Peoples dispossessing one another? - The extinction of
the
Australian pygmies
Keith Windschuttle
and Tim Gillin
Quadrant
June 2002
http://www.sydneyline.com/Pygmies%20Extinction.htm
The highlands people of Papua New Guinea have
short, wiry hair that feels like steel wool.

The Tasmanian Aborigines were said to have similar
hair; but mainland Australian aborigines do not - except,
it seems, for pygmies of the Cairns region (who may have
"died out").
The study of indigenous people is constrained by
political considerations."the moral appeal of the
{Aboriginal} activists' case would have been weakened by
the notion that there had been several waves of
Aboriginal migrants, each of whom had violently
dispossessed the other"
The extinction of the Australian pygmies
From the 1940s until the 1960s, it was fairly
widely known there were pygmies in Australia. They lived
in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the
tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region.
This was a fact recorded at the time not only in
anthropological textbooks and articles but also in
popular books about the Australian Aborigines. There was
even an award-winning children's book tracing their
origins. The more famous photographs of the Australian
pygmies were reproduced in both the academic and the
popular literature.

At the time, there was controversy about their origins
but not over the fact of their existence. In 1962, the
first volume of Manning Clark's History of Australia
recorded their presence on its first two pages and
repeated the then influential anthropological theory
about their origins and their place in the waves of
migration of hunter-gatherer peoples from Asia who
populated the Australian continent in the millennia
before the British arrived in 1788. [1]
Yet, since then, the Australian pygmies have been totally
obliterated from public memory. To test just how complete
this process has been, over recent months we have
questioned a wide range of friends and acquaintances.
Although most were well-educated and well-read people,
none had ever heard of the pygmies, not even when we used
some of their other, once-familiar alternative names such as
"Negritos" and "Barrineans". A few
friends scoffed at the notion and demanded some evidence.
They wouldn't believe us until we emailed them the
photographs.
The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia (1994),
published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Studies, today does its best to
disguise these people. It lists some of their tribes,
including the Djabuganjdji, Mbarbaram (Barbaram) and
Yidinjdji (Indindji), but does not mention a word about
their stature. Only its entry "Rainforest
Region" records the existence of "small,
curly-haired people with languages which have distinctive
features", but the accompanying photograph of
Yidinjdji tribesmen taken in 1893 does not give any scale
or point of comparison to show that these adult males
were only about 140 centimeters (four feet six inches)
tall. [2] Joseph Birdsell, height 186 centimetres (six
feet one inch), with twenty-four-year-old male of the
Kongkandji tribe, height 140 centimetres (four feet six
inches). The photograph was taken at Mona Mona Mission,
near Kuranda, North Queensland, in 1938.
Both the major introductory textbooks to Australian
prehistory, Josephine Flood's Archaeology of the
Dreamtime, and John Mulvaney's and Johan Kamminga's
Prehistory of Australia, still provide brief discussions
of the academic debate about these people's origins. Both
describe them, respectively, as having "small
stature and spirally curled hair" and as a
"short, slightly-built people with dark skin and
woolly hair", but both decline to include
photographs like those published here, which immediately
convey just how dramatically different from other
Aborigines they are. [3] Similarly, the latest edition of
Ronald and Catherine Berndt's standard text in
anthropology, The World of the First Australians, briefly
discusses people from northeast Queensland who
"might have negrito affinities" but does not
mention their height. They dismiss any question of their
difference as "purely statistical". [4]

Our previous studies have shown that all Eurasian
and Oceanian founder haplogroups - mitochondrial
M, N, and R and Y-chromosomal C, D, and F -
coexist in South Asia, suggesting their
comigration along the southern coastal route in
one wave after the exit of modem humans from
Africa (1, 3-5). Because the Andaman Negrito
populations carry only one mitochondrial founder
haplogroup (M) and only one Y-chromosomal
haplogroup (D), it is tempting to relate this
phylogeographic pattern with a
one-haplogroup-one-migration scenario. However,
the shallow phylogenetic time depths of M31 and
M32 in Onge and Great Andamanese populations
(Fig. 1) more likely reflect the effect of
genetic drift in these extremely small
populations. Therefore, it is not surprising that
the founding mtDNA haplogroups N* and R* and Y
-chromosomal haplogroups C and F may have
completely disappeared from the extant Andaman
and Nicobar islanders. www.andaman.org
|
No one today with a lay interest in Aboriginal
anthropology, and few of those doing introductory courses
in the subject, would ever find out that Australia had a
pygmy people. What, then, has been going on? Why would
these people have been expunged from popular memory? How
did the
Australian pygmies become extinct within the public
consciousness?
There have been two main reasons. We explain them in
detail below but, briefly, they were: first, a vitriolic
debate within the academic discipline of anthropology in
which the view prevailed that there was nothing
remarkable about these people; second, the emergence in
the 1960s of the radical Aboriginal political movement,
which found the existence of a pygmy people an
inconvenient counter-example to one of its central
doctrines. As a result, these indigenous Australians have
been subject to an airbrushing from history that makes
even that of the old Bolshevik leadership of the USSR in
the 1930s look mild by comparison.
Pedestrian foragers during the late
19th century
Aboriginal encampment in rainforest behind Cairns, 1890.
This is the photograph (attributed to A. Atkinson) found
by Norman Tindale in 1938, which sent him and Joseph
Birdsell in search of the people depicted. He identified
the location by the wild banana leaves on the roof of the
hut.
The first extended contact between Europeans and
Australian pygmies occurred in the 1890s at Yarrabah, an
Anglican church mission to Aborigines established in 1892
at Cape Grafton, just south of Cairns. The three main
tribes in the region were the Kongkandji (Gungganydji),
Indindji and Barbaram, whose territories covered,
respectively, the coastal area around Cape Grafton, the
eastern slopes of the Atherton Tableland from Lake
Barrine south to Gordonvale, and the Great Dividing Range
behind Cairns. All of them shared the same very short
physical stature, as well as similar languages and
culture.
In the mission's first five years, about 150 Kongkandji
periodically visited to receive rations but only a small
number remained there permanently. [5] [6] After the
Queensland Government passed its
Aboriginal Protection Act in 1897, which forced
Aborigines to be legally confined to reserves and
missions, Yarrabah grew to a settlement of 150 residents
drawn not only from the three local tribes but also from
people all over North Queensland who bore no physical or
cultural resemblance to the Cape Grafton Aborigines.
Outside the mission, however, no one paid these people
any special attention until an Adelaide researcher came
across them in the late 1930s.
In 1938, Norman Tindale, an entomologist and
anthropologist at the South Australian Museum, was going
through a package of old photographs of Aborigines from
the Warburton Mission sent him by a friend in Western
Australia. One of the photographs of a group of men and
women was labeled "Aborigines of north-west
Australia". The Warburton Mission was on the edge of
the Gibson Desert, but the background of the photograph
was clearly tropical jungle. It showed a wet weather hut
thatched with what Tindale, a keen naturalist, recognized
as the broad leaves of the wild banana tree. He could
also tell that, if these were banana leaves, the people
by comparison were very small. He made some enquiries and
soon found that the only remaining stands of this plant
were in the
tropical rainforests on the eastern slopes of the
Atherton Tableland in North Queensland. [7]
At the time, Tindale and the American academic, Joseph
Birdsell, were engaged in the most extensive project ever mounted
in Australian physical anthropology to measure a large
sample of Aborigines according to their weight, stature
and a number of other bodily characteristics. They found
the prospect of discovering a group in the Queensland
rainforests so at variance with the norm, irresistible.
They also knew that, since the nineteenth century, there
had been a number of theories about the origins of the
Aborigines and the migration of ancient peoples to the
Australian continent. In 1927, in his book, Environment
and Race, the controversial Sydney geographer, Griffith
Taylor, had speculated that several waves of Aboriginal
migrants had swept before them an even older
"Negrito" race. [8] Maybe these rainforest
people held the key to the story.
As soon as they could, Tindale and Birdsell drove from
Adelaide to Cairns in search of the people in the
photograph. They eventually found six hundred of them
from twelve different tribal groups living on and around
two missions, Yarrabah at Cape Grafton and Mona Mona at
Kuranda on the Atherton Tableland. Some of them had only
come in from the rainforest within the previous six years
and spoke only their native
tongue. They said there was still one family living a
completely nomadic, hunter-gatherer life in the mountains
behind Cardwell. [9]
"The skull of Homo floresiensis can only
hold a brain that's about 380 cc. in size."The
modern human skull [at left] holds a brain that measures
between 1,400 and 1,500 cc." (Peter
Brown)
Tindale and Birdsell examined and measured 52 adults and
children at Cape Grafton and 95 at Kuranda. Most adult
males were between 140 and 150 centimeters tall (four
feet six inches to five feet). The women were shorter by
15 to 30 centimeters (six to twelve inches). Tindale and
Birdsell concluded they were not just small but were
radically unlike any other Aborigines in Australia. They
named them Barrineans, after nearby Lake Barrine. Tindale
later said:
Their small size, tightly curled hair, child-like faces,
peculiarities in their tooth dimensions and their blood
groupings showed that they were different from other
Australian Aborigines and had a strong strain of Negrito
in them. Their faces bore unmistakable resemblances to
those of the now extinct Tasmanians, as shown by
photographs and plaster casts of the last of those
people. [10]
By 1963, when Tindale wrote these words in his book,
Aboriginal Australians, the Barrinean pygmies were no
longer an unknown people consigned to the oblivion of
distant mission stations. Nor were they mere physical
curiosities. They had become the centerpiece of what was
then a widely influential explanation of the origins of
human settlement on this continent. Their existence was
offered as powerful confirmation of what was known as the
"trihybrid theory" of hunter-gatherer migration
to Australia. This theory had been primarily developed by
Birdsell, who
came to do fieldwork in Australia for a PhD in
anthropology at Harvard Unviersity. He originally announced it in 1941 in the
American Journal of Physical Anthropology. [11] Over
subsequent decades, both he and Tindale worked on the
theory, drawing connections between the Australian
Aborigines' physical differences and a growing body of
evidence about Pleistocene era hunter-gatherer migrations
across Asia, archaeological findings of skulls and stone
tools in Australia, and data about Aboriginal genes and
blood types. The trihybrid theory that eventually
emerged went as follows.
(Illustrat.The
existence of a morphologically robust Pleistocene
Australian population has been controversial. This is
largely due to the pivotal role this group has played in
the multiregional model of modern human origins.Recently
published luminescence dates for Kow Swamp are evaluated.
We find that they provide reasonable dates for sediments
at the site but are unrelated to buried human remains
excavated at Kow Swamp during the 1970s.)
There were three major waves of migration of quite
different ancient people who came to the Australian
continent from southeast Asia. More than 40,000 years
ago, when sea levels were much lower and Australia, New
Guinea and Tasmania comprised one landmass, called Sahul,
the first
to arrive were a slightly-built people of pygmoid stature
with dark skin and very frizzy hair. They were Negritos
(named after the Spanish "little negro"), and
they provided the initial population for the whole of
this Greater Australia. About 20,000 years ago, a second
type of people arrived from Asia. These newcomers, called
Murrayians, were comparatively lightly skinned,
wavy-haired, stocky in build, with a lot of body hair.
They drove the Negritos before them until the latter
retreated to the highlands of New Guinea, the rainforests
of North Queensland and to then ice-capped Tasmania. The
Murrayians became the dominant population on the east
coast of Australia, and the open grasslands and parklands
of the south and west of the continent. Then, about
15,000 years ago, a third wave of hunter-gatherers
arrived. They were comparatively tall, straight-haired
and dark skinned, with very little body hair. Named
Carpentarians, they colonised northern and
central Australia.

This picture is regionally
complicated by both southern hemisphere monsoon and long
term El Niño Southern Oscillation influences. The
charcoal records suggest a complex pattern of burning
with generally more frequent or intense fires during
climate transitions and also during drier periods except
when and where fuel availability became a limitation.
Superimposed on this largely cyclical pattern is a trend,
within the last 300,000 to 200,000 years, towards more
open canopied vegetation and increased burning. It is
considered that regional reorganisation of oceanic and
atmospheric circulation were the major causes of the
early part of this trend although a human contribution
cannot be totally discounted. Marked and sustained
changes in vegetation and burning patterns within isotope
stage 3 (IS3), corresponding with dated archaeological
evidence for the presence of people and for megafaunal
extinction, suggest that this was the time of the major,
if not the first, invasion of Australasia by people
within the Pleistocene period.
Now, anyone who even casually dips into the literature on
Aboriginal prehistory will find it a field where the
evidence is thin on the ground but the air is thick with
speculation. The trihybrid theory, however, was a
comparative exception to this rule. Its authors found
they could deploy a wide body of evidence in its support.
They offered four different kinds of confirmation.
The first was their own project in physical anthropology.
In two ventures into the field in 1938-39 and 1952-54,
Tindale and Birdsell conducted by far the biggest survey
of Aboriginal physiological
characteristics ever undertaken, then or since. In their
first expedition, sponsored by Harvard and Adelaide
universities and the Carnegie Corporation of New York,
they took measurements, blood samples and interviews with
about 900 full-blood and 1500 mixed-blood Aborigines.
With their wives as secretaries and research assistants,
they drove to almost every Aboriginal settlement,
reserve, mission and camp in eastern, southern and
south-western Australia. In the second expedition, the
same team surveyed another 2000 people in north-western
Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
They constructed a database of multiple variables,
including weight, stature, sitting height, shoulder
breadth, tooth form and size, skin colour, and details
such as baldness and beard abundance at certain ages.
They compared variables among regional groups and found
there were statistically significant measurements
confirming their three different physiological types.
[12]
Both authors also published separate genetic studies of
the Aborigines, based on blood types and family
genealogies. This material was collected before the
discovery of DNA and so retains the limitations of its
time, being confined to an analysis of the O, A, B blood
groups, the M, N
blood types and the Rh series. [13]
These
original Australians were essentially
hunter-gatherers without domesticated animals,
other than the dingo, which was introduced by the
Aborigines between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. The
Aborigines employed a type of ?firestick farming?
in which fire was used to clear areas so that
fresh grazing grasses could grow, thereby
attracting kangaroos and other game animals.
Aborigines also may have harvested and dispersed
selected seeds. Those widespread operations may
have been responsible for extensive tracts of
grassland. There is evidence of careful damming
and redirection of streams and of swamp and lake
outlets, possibly for fish farming.
www.marymediatrix.com/mission/kb/kb3/5.shtml |
Their second type of support came from the remnant
populations from whom the three Australian types were
supposedly derived. Birdsell argued that, between the Bay
of Bengal and the Melanesian islands, there was an arc of
isolated peoples still in existence who all shared
Negrito characteristics. They included the pygmy peoples
of the Andaman Islands off the west coast of Burma, the
Semang of the central mountains of the Malay Peninsula,
the Aeta of the rainforests of several of the larger
Philippine islands, a number of Negrito tribes, including
the Tapiro and the Timorini, in the New Guinea highlands,
the people of the Varzimberg Mountains of the Gazelle
Peninsula of New Britain, and some tribes in the interior
of northern New Caledonia.
These were all remnants, Birdsell argued, of a chain of
migration by ancient Negritos across south Asia to the
Pacific. He speculated that the chain had begun in Africa
with an ancestral population of Negrito pygmies but the
only connection he could make between the African and
Oceanic Negritos was a propensity for women to develop
steatopygia, a genetic condition that causes an excess of
fat deposits on the buttocks and upper thighs. The second
and third waves of migrant people, the authors argued, were also
connected to remnants of ancient populations still living
in Asia. The Murrayians, Birdsell said, had come from an
Asian people whose other vestiges were the Ainu of
Hokkaido in northern Japan and Sakhalin Island.
Similarly, the Carpentarians bore similar physical
characteristics to the Vedda people of south India and
Sri Lanka. [14]
The third type of evidence they offered was
archaeological. Tindale and
Birdsell claimed that excavations of ancient skulls and
stone tools confirmed their thesis. They said the bones
from Australia's two most famous ancient burial sites,
Lake Mungo and Kow Swamp, supported their ideas. Most
archaeologists who support a "one people" model
of Aboriginal origins find it hard to explain how the
more "gracile" people found at Lake Mungo are
much older (more than 25,000 years old) than the more
"robust" skulls found at Kow Swamp
(10,000-13,000 years old).
Theories about evolution within the one population would
expect the reverse. Tindale and Birdsell, however, said
this pattern not only showed that Australia was populated
by more than one type of people but it also fitted their
particular thesis. The gracile or small-boned skeletons
were probably those of the smaller, more slender
Negritos, while the robust skulls were most likely
Murrayian people. [15] These
claims, however, were no more than speculation since
neither author ever
made a study of the excavations from either site.
Cover: Mungo III
excavation (J. M. Bowler & A. G. Thorne in The
Origin of the Australians, 127Ð138; Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1976).
Permission to use image kindly approved by the Three
Traditional Tribal Groups (Elders Council) of the
Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area

Aerial view of Lake
Mungo lunette, including 'The Walls of China'.
Willandra's archaeological record demonstrates continuous
human occupation of the area for at least 40,000 years.
Their observations about stone tools, however, were a
different matter. Tindale collected hand axes, cutting
and chopping tools, spear points and other stone flakes
from a number of sites in South Australia, New South
Wales, Queensland and Western Australia and classified
them according to time (he was one of the first in
Australia to see the potential of carbon dating), place
and culture. He classified large ancient stone tools from
some sites as part of "Kartan Culture".
Similar-sized but slightly younger tools, which were more
finely worked and sharper, he labeled "Tartangan
Culture". He argued both Kartan and Tartangan tools
were produced by Negritos and were evidence of at least
two distinct waves of Negrito migration to Australia.
The Murrayians, Tindale claimed,
had a culture that developed much finer stone tools. In
fact, he said the evidence indicated there were three
separate types of Murrayian culture, which he named
Pirrian, Mudukian and Murundian. All three phases were
reflected by innovations in their stone implements. The
Carpentarians, in turn, had their own distinctive
culture, which was reflected in much more sophisticated
stone tools and far more deadly stone and wooden weapons.
In short, the three different types of ancient migrants
had not only distinct physiologies but also their own
identifiable cultures. [16]
The fourth support for the trihybrid thesis was invoked
by Birdsell in the way the whole case fitted the ideas of
Sewall Wright, one of the major figures in twentieth
century neo-Darwinian biology. Birdsell regarded his own
academic field less as anthropology and more as the study
of "microevolution", or how genetic change at
the level of the small group affected larger populations
or species. The main point of his Australian fieldwork
was to provide empirical confirmation for Wright's
"shifting balance" theory of evolution, first
proposed in 1931.
Wright argued that random genetic mutations could often
have permanent effects on populations even though they
might not offer any adaptive advantage for the population
as a whole. Once they became established within a small
group, random genetic novelties could eventually be
transmitted to a much larger parent population through
small but persistent degrees of interbreeding. Hence
evolutionary change could occur in ways other than the
Darwinian process of natural selection. There had been
some experimental laboratory support among insect
populations to show that this was one successful path to
evolutionary change but Birdsell thought his empirical
data from the Aborigines confirmed it too. [17]
Birdsell not only sought to establish that three distinct
groups of hunter-gathers had populated Australia but also
wanted to study their subsequent pattern of evolution,
which he thought his anatomical measurements could
detect. He believed he had corroborated Wright's theory
and that it, in turn, substantiated his own work. In
1978, in his massive work, Evolution and Genetics of
Populations, Wright himself concurred with Birdsell's
conclusion. [18]
The "one people" thesis
of Aboriginal origins
In the nineteenth century, most Europeans who looked at
the Australian Aborigines thought they were a homogenous
people, except for the Tasmanians, who were regarded by
most who saw them as distinctly Melanesian in appearance.
[19] Until Tindale and Birdsell's trihybrid theory came
along, most twentieth century academic anthropologists
accepted a largely homogenous model on the mainland too.
In particular, a group of anthropologists and anatomists
at the University of Sydney
espoused this position and defended it strongly.
The principal advocates of the Sydney position were Stan
Larnach and N. W. G. Macintosh, both of the university's
Department of Anatomy. They believed that all the
Aborigines who occupied Greater Australia came from a
small single breeding unit. "Three women and two or
three men may
have initiated the peopling of Australia," Larnach
wrote in 1974 in an oft-cited paper. [20] They probably
arrived here by chance after being blown off course, he
said, or they may have been seeking refuge. He
acknowledged that additional small landings of the same
people may have
boosted the population but insisted that only one group
was sufficient to fully populate the empty continent
within two or three thousand years of their first
arrival. Hence, he argued, all modern Aborigines were
descendants of this original group.
When Tindale told the Sydney anthropologists in the late
1930s that he had found pygmy people in North Queensland,
they dismissed his speculations about their separate
origins as nothing but a particular, local evolution.
Tindale and Birdsell, as representatives of a minor
museum in Adelaide, found themselves treated as outsiders
tilting at an academic establishment that would not
budge. One of their collaborators, John Greenway, called
the Sydney school "the tail that wags the
anthropology dog in Australia", for Tindale soon
found that its rejection of his ideas determined the
academic consensus around the country. [21]
Beyond university anthropologists, however, the trihybrid
thesis was much better accepted, as Manning Clark
demonstrated when he used it to open his historical
magnum opus in 1962. "Before the work of
Tindale," Clark wrote, "writers attempting to
explain origins were forced back on
intelligent guesses." [22]
This map is a reproduction of
and extract from Norman B. Tindale's 1974 map of
indigenous groups' boundaries showing the geographic
location of Aboriginal cultural groups in the Riverland
region at the time of first European settlement in
Australia.
Tindale was to dedicate
his research efforts for the next two decades towards
proving that Aboriginal groups did relate territorially
to distinct regions that could be successfully mapped.
His tribal map of Australia, first published in 1940 and
revised in 1974 together with his encyclopaedia of
Aboriginal tribal groups, was radical in its fundamental
implication that Australia was not terra nullius -
decades before the Mabo judgement made it a national
issue.
In the 1950s and 60s, the authors were sought out by
publishers to write some of the first books about
Aborigines for popular audiences. One of these works,
Aboriginal Australians, was written by Tindale and H. A.
Lindsay in 1963. Tindale also produced two books for
schoolchildren. In 1955, he and Lindsay wrote The First
Walkabout, a story about a family of Negrito pygmies
migrating to Australia, which won the award as best
Australian book of the year for children in 1956. In a
glossary at the end of the book, the authors informed
their readers: "A few survivors of these tribes live
near Kuranda today." [23] Later, in 1971, Tindale
and his daughter Beryl wrote an illustrated children's
book, The Australian Aborigines, which also incorporated
their ideas. [24]
At the same time, however, a political movement was
gathering force that would later swamp the trihybrid
thesis and dissuade any converts it had won. In the late
1960s, Aboriginal activists and their white supporters
began to build a political movement among all Australian
Aboriginal people. Previous attempts to achieve this had
failed because Aborigines were divided by geography,
culture and, in some places, by language, and few felt
they had much in common.
The Sixties movement adopted the anti-imperialist
rhetoric then prevalent in southeast Asia and Africa.
British colonialism had caused indigenous oppression and
dispossession, they argued, so all Aborigines should come
together to reject the hegemony of white Australia.
Although this was primarily a movement of radical urban
blacks trying to create a constituency among dispersed
Aborigines in rural areas, the appeal galvanized
considerable support, especially among white
sympathizers.
Their appeal to pan-Aboriginalism, the notion that all
Australian indigenous people had a common political
interest, was always dependent on the idea that they were
one people. (The only exception allowed was that of the
Torres Strait Islanders, who were later defined as a
separate entity.) Their politics were based on the claim
that they were the original owners of the continent who
had been dispossessed by the British. They did not want
to allow there might be a hierarchy of claims for
arrival, and thus ownership, among Aborigines themselves.
So anyone who argued against the "one people"
thesis would be seen as betraying the pan-Aboriginal
movement and undermining Aboriginal political
aspirations.
Moreover, the moral appeal of the activists' case would
have been weakened by the notion that there had been
several waves of Aboriginal migrants, each of whom had
violently dispossessed the other. Rather than a story of
aggressive white imperialists disrupting an arcadian
Aboriginal people living in harmony with one another and
their environment, the long term history of Australian
habitation would have resembled more that of humanity at
large where the stronger have pushed aside the weaker,
irrespective of the colour of either side. Hence, instead
of a simple moral tale of goodies and baddies, the
history of this continent would have reflected more the
hard reality of the human condition everywhere.
For the past thirty years, there have been few in
mainstream political or intellectual life with the
stomach to make these points. As a result, the activists'
case about Aboriginal origins has been accepted, largely
without dissent. Few authors, and certainly none writing
for schoolchildren, have dared to even suggest that
Aborigines had anything but one common source. This is
why today the educated but non-specialist public has no
inkling that there were ever pygmies in Australia.
Knowledge of their existence would pose an obvious
question mark over the central doctrine of Aboriginal
politics. Hence, for public consumption, politics have
made the topic taboo.
Among academic anthropologists and prehistorians, there
has been a consensus since the Sixties that has largely
agreed with this view. Over this period, the trihybrid
thesis has still been discussed in the major
anthropological textbooks, but only to be dismissed.
Josephine Flood's Archaeology of the Dreamtime devotes
two paragraphs Birdsell's ideas and announces:
"There is no evidence to support the identification
of a Negritic element in Australia." Hence, among
anthropologists, she says: "There has been a general
rejection of the three-wave theory." [25] John
Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga, in Prehistory of Australia,
take an even stronger line. There is little evidence,
they say, to support Birdsell's theories, which are
"in any case irrelevant to present-day issues in
recent human evolution". They warn off
non-specialists from even discussing the notion. "It
is unfortunate that general authors still recount the
tri-hybrid racial theory despite the evidence to the
contrary." [26]

Even though we have suggested there are political reasons
why Aboriginal activists and their supporters would not
want this thesis accepted, we want to emphasise that we
are not saying that this is the only reason, or even the
principal reason, why academic anthropologists have
followed suit. The history of the academic debate quite
clearly shows that many anthropologists believed in the
homogeneity of Aboriginal origins from the 1930s to the
1950s, that is, long before the political movement arose
in the Sixties. A number of them simply continued to
stick to their guns on this issue, irrespective of the
political debate. Rather, our case is that the rise of
Aboriginal political activism cast the trihybrid thesis
into a particular political corner. It appeared a thesis
that would give support to anyone opposed to
pan-Aboriginalism and could thus be used against
Aboriginal political aspirations. This added one more
reason why those engaged in Aboriginal studies felt it
should be buried.
The real problem with the mainstream anthropological case
is not so much that it is political but that it is so
dubious. For despite the self-assured tones in which
Flood, Mulvaney and Kamminga write off Tindale and
Birdsell, the evidence they and their colleagues cite
hardly warrants such a confident dismissal. They make
their case with four types of evidence:
Craniology: The measurement and comparison of both fossil
and more recent skulls undermines the trihybrid thesis,
Mulvaney and Kamminga claim. They cite the Sydney
anatomists Macintosh and Larnach who in the 1970s made
craniometric measurements of eastern Australian skulls,
including some from the Cairns rainforest people, but
could not distinguish the latter from other Aborigines.
[27] Josephine Flood cites the same studies:
"Analysis of recent skeletal material from northern
Queensland did not produce any evidence of a Negritic
component among the rainforest Aborigines." In
Tasmania, Flood observes, skeletal remains from King
Island, West Point and Mount Cameron West show no
differences between prehistoric Tasmanian Aborigines and
contemporary mainlanders. [28]
Not only is there no evidence of distinct Negrito crania,
but even the apparent dissimilarities between the gracile
skulls found at Lake Mungo and the robust variety found
at Kow Swamp turn out to be not so different after all.
Phillip Habgood of the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Sydney claimed in an influential 1986
article that Australian fossil skulls display an
"Australianness" that is unique to them. That
is, "the 'gracile' and robust' groups are more
similar to
each other, overall, than they are to any other
anatomically modern Homo Sapiens crania from around the
world." [29]
Genetics: Mulvaney and Kamminga argue that neither
Birdsell nor his opponents can use genetic evidence as
supports for their thesis because it is inconclusive.
"Fifty years of blood genetic research," they
argue, "has failed to provide any clue to Aboriginal
origins." [30] Josephine
Flood, however, is more certain that genetic research
actually counts against the trihybrid thesis.
"Recent genetic studies," she writes,
"have shown that pygmy groups are not racially
distinct, but simply represent local modification in
physique in relation to their neighbours." [31]
Linguistics: According to Mulvaney and Kamminga, there
are not only no craniometric differences between Tindale
and Birdsell's Negritos and other Aborigines but nor has
any linguistic evidence for their separate origin ever
been found. "Apart from Torres Strait
languages," they report, "no ancestral links
with languages overseas have been demonstrated."
[32]
Human evolution: The critics argue that the small
stature, the frizzy hair and other apparent Negrito
characteristics that Tindale and Birdsell observed in
North Queensland can be readily explained not by separate
origins but by local evolution. Although Josephine Flood
admits that Australian Aborigines are among the world's
most physically varying population, this is not evidence
of multiple origins, she says. Instead, she endorses
Phillip Habgood's explanation that: "Morphological
variation displayed by the late Pleistocene skeletal
material developed as a result of mutation, genetic
selection and drift (the accidental loss of lineages) as
the first migrants moved out into a diversity of
environments and climates." [33] That is, the
Australian Aborigines had one common origin but evolved
differently when separated from other, larger
populations. Flood makes a similar point about Tasmania:
"The differences observed between Tasmanian and
mainland Aborigines in
historic times are now considered to result from genetic
change in a small, isolated population." [34]
In other words, the Tasmanians didn't have their frizzy
hair and 
Melanesian looks when they arrived there, but these
features evolved
during the eight-to-ten thousand years that Tasmania has
been separated
from the mainland. Similarly, the tribes around Cairns
were not short,
slender, frizzy-haired and of Negrito appearance when
they first came to
the district. These characteristics evolved naturally
over the period
they lived in the rainforests.
Before discussing these points, we should point out that
the trihybrid theory does not claim its three waves of
immigrants always remained separate peoples. As the
'hybrid' of its title was designed to emphasise, there
was a good deal of interbreeding over the millennia. In
Tasmania, before the sea rose to cut it off from the
mainland, the theory holds that the Negritos and the
Murrayians interbred fairly extensively. Birdsell wrote:
The Tasmanians represent a dihybrid race whose
predominant genetic element is not Negrito, but on the
contrary represents the Murrayian Australian type from
the south-eastern portion of that continent. The Oceanic
Negritic element is clearly present but
a
comparison with the Andamanese indicates that the
Negritic element in the Tasmanians must have been the
minority contribution. [35]
On the other hand, he did believe that, while there had
also been interbreeding in North Queensland, the
Aborigines he found in the Cairns district were
relatively more authentic examples of the original
Negrito people. This means that any debate about
morphological differences, or
outward appearance, should be in terms of statistical
tendencies rather than clear-cut distinctions. With this
in mind, let us put some objections to the case outlined
above.
Problems for the orthodox position
Tindale's
commitment to data-gathering was not an end in itself,
but represented an attempt to build a picture of
Aboriginal life within the frame of the Australian
environment. This commitment was exemplified by his
central role during the Board for Anthropological
Research expeditions to remote Central Australia
locations, organised from Adelaide during the 1930s. He
was responsible for purchasing and documenting artefacts,
making sound, cinematic and photographic records of daily
life and ceremonies, recording sociological data, as well
as collecting natural science specimens.
Craniology: The research that is most widely regarded as
having
demolished the idea that the rainforest people from
Cairns are Negritos
was published in 1970 by Larnach and Macintosh. It was a
study of 116 skulls of Queensland Aborigines held by the
Australian Museum. Twelve of them came from the Cairns
districts where Birdsell had found the pygmy people. The
anatomists listed all the characteristics of these skulls
and then performed a number of statistical tests on the
results. They found they could not distinguish the skulls
from Cairns from those of Aborigines from elsewhere in
Queensland. They concluded:
On the basis of craniology alone, it does seem that the
very existence of Negritos in Australia is, to say the
least, open to very serious doubt, and so far no
prehistoric skulls have been discovered that would
qualify this statement
These results fail to
support Birdsell's theory of the trihybrid origin of
Australian Aborigines. [36]
While it is certainly true that their results fail to
support Birdsell's theory, it is equally true, however,
that they do little to actually refute it. Given that
this is a debate about statistical tendencies, a
comparison of 12 skulls within a total population of 116
is hardly a major study and goes nowhere near matching
the sample size from which Birdsell drew. His data
included not only thirteen skulls from the Cairns
district but also live measurements from 147 Aborigines
there. As well as thirty head and face measurements,
Tindale and Birdsell's studies in 1938-39 and 1952-54
included weight, stature and twenty other body indices
and metrics. The total population to which he compared
this data comprised 3008 full-blooded Aborigines from all
major regions of Australia.
Birdsell maintained right up to his last book in 1993,
Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australia, that
his own analysis of these measurements confirmed his
thesis. It is only by pretending this huge amount of data
does not exist, and by confining their evidence to their
own measurements, that Larnach and Macintosh can be
thought to have decided the issue.
In any case, skull measurement is not exactly a precise
science. It involves a high degree of interpretation.
Over the years, people looking at the same sets of skulls
have often interpreted them in accordance with the latest
anthropological fashions. Macintosh admitted he had done
this himself. In the 1960s, he said none of Australia's
fossil skulls showed any Tasmanian traits and none of the
Tasmanian skulls had any connection with Melanesia. In
the 1970s, however, after two other
researchers argued that Tasmanian skulls were closer to
those of the Tolai people of New Britain than they were
to mainland Aborigines, Macintosh changed his mind and
agreed with them. At the same time, he acknowledged that
the Keilor skull from Victoria showed some particular
Tasmanian characteristics. [37]
Despite these uncertainties, by the mid-1970s, skull
measurements were being used even more confidently to
support the "one people" thesis. Its supporters
argued that, despite the great variations in Australian
fossil skulls, they could all be interpreted within the
one framework. The gracile and robust skulls from Lake
Mungo and Kow Swamp, they claimed, should not be regarded
as evidence of two different types of people but rather
as different points on one broad scale of difference
within a single population. This was a remarkable
conclusion, since there have been some dissenting
anthropologists who have argued the Kow Swamp skulls are
so radically different from the Australian norm that they
are less like Homo sapiens and actually more like the
earlier
hominid, Homo erectus.
The "one people" theorists, however, have no
trouble in accommodating such extremes within their own
model. Macintosh and Larnach told an Australian Institute
of Aboriginal studies symposium in 1974: How should we
interpret this mélange of gracile, intermediate and
rugged items? To us, there is only one answer: a
practically unchanging population over a period of 25,000
years and exhibiting a wide range of variability. [38]
This approach, it is worth noting, makes the "one
people" thesis virtually unfalsifiable, since it
permits no evidence, no matter how disparate, to
challenge itself. In real science, of course,
unfalsifiable hypotheses should be ruled out of court
immediately.
Genetics: The Sydney school has long been convinced that
genetic studies also support the notion of an homogenous
population. Larnach wrote in 1974 that, as a result of
new genetic research: "We therefore have no
hesitation in omitting Negritos as ancestors of the
Australian Aborigines." [39] The work he cited was a
then new study of Aboriginal blood groups by R. T.
Simmons of the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. Simmons
had reviewed various surveys of blood samples taken from
Aborigines on Cape York, the Gulf of Carpentaria and
Arnhem Land between 1926 and 1971 and compared their gene
frequencies. Among these surveys were those done by
Tindale and Birdsell at the Yarrabah and Mona Mona
missions in 1938-39.
Simmons found there were some blood group gene frequency
patterns at certain Cape York localities that were
unique. However, rather than use these as evidence of a
unique population history, he said they could all be
explained by known factors such as admixture with other
races and by breeding from very small gene pools.
Otherwise: "Our findings do not suggest that the
Aborigines of the Cape York area are basically different
from those found in other parts of Australia, but are
more admixed." Simmons added that his findings
supported the "one people" model. "In
three decades of blood group research, we have found no
blood group genetic evidence which would suggest that the
unmixed Aborigines are not a homogenous people."
[40]
For good measure, he paid particular attention to the
question of any possible Australian connections to
Africa. Repudiating the "Out of Africa" theory
of human origins, Simmons said he thought that the
Australian data indicated that the Aborigines actually
evolved earlier than African Negroes. There was no blood
group evidence, he said, to indicate the African Negroes
or Negritos had any connection to the Australian
Aborigines.
May I state here and now that our extensive blood
grouping surveys conducted in Australia, Indonesia,
Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia over three decades
have produced no genetic evidence that the Negro ever
entered the Pacific. The term Oceanic Negro in relation
to Melanesians is then purely descriptive
The
extensive data now available on blood group gene
frequencies make it appear unlikely that African, Asian
and Oceanic pygmy groups are related. Blood group studies
indicate that Papuan pygmies or Negritos differ widely
from pygmy groups in other parts of the world, but that
they are closely akin to neighbouring Papuans. Similar
relationships have been found for other Negrito
populations and their taller neighbours. The so-called
Negrito or pygmy peoples outside Africa should then be
called pygmy, and not Negrito as a descriptive term. [41]
Despite the confidence of his tone, however, Simmons's
conclusions were not as definitive as he thought,
especially in the light of new genetic research. Simmons
was writing in the period before mitochondrial DNA
studies arose in the 1980s to revolutionise the field.
Mitochondrial DNA
(mtDNA) is claimed by those who use it to provide a far
more illuminating means of tracing human evolution than
older and cruder methods used by researchers such as
Simmons.
 All
living humans had their roots in Africa
It
was the beginning of a revolution in
paleoanthropology. Geneticists were hooking up
with bone men everywhere. They were focusing on
mtDNA because the mitochondria, which lie outside
the nucleus, are easier to study in a human cell
there are only 37 mitochondrial genes compared
with 100,000 genes found in the nucleusóand
because it is the only DNA anyone has been able
to isolate and interpret in ancient fossils. For
reasons not yet understood mtDNA survives the
ravages of time better than nuclear DNA. And it
has another interesting attribute: It's inherited
only through the maternal line. Scientists seized
upon this characteristic to try to build genetic
family trees. Almost two years ago, geneticists
working in Sweden and Germany reported studying
the mtDNA of 53 living people from around the
world. Within this small sample, they found that
Africans shared a characteristic sequence of
mtDNA, and that everyone else carried at least
some portion of that sequence in their cells. The
research suggests that all living humans had
their roots in Africa. But Thorne doesn't put
much stock in this report. He thinks the
conclusions are questionable because samples
taken in Africa today could be from people whose
ancestors were not African.
|
One of the major mtDNA studies was done in 1989 on the
populations of the Pacific region. It was made by two of
the leading pioneers of DNA research, Mark Stoneking and
Allan Wilson, then of the University of California,
Berkeley, who were the authors of the now famous study
that found our oldest modern human ancestor, the 200,000
year-old African woman, "Mitochondrial Eve".
[42] Their Pacific study included data from 21 Aboriginal
Australians from four regions: Alice Springs, Darwin,
Perth and the Broome-Derby area. [43] It found that mtDNA
types were not shared between different regions of
Australia and that the distribution of mtDNA types in
Australia was diverse, just like on other continents. The
most likely explanation, Stoneking and Wilson argued, was
that "the populations that colonized each continent
(including Australia) consisted of more than one mtDNA
type." [44] In other words, the Aboriginal
population was not homogenous.
In fact, Stoneking and Wilson said their work showed that
at least 15 different mtDNA lineages colonized Australia.
They said this confirmed an earlier study of Aboriginal
Australians done in 1987 with a smaller sample, which
found seven different mtDNA lineages. The authors
acknowledged the smallness of their sample but argued
that a bigger size would only increase the number of
different lineages to be found. "Probably the most
important insight to date," they summarized,
"is that relatively many females were involved in
the colonization of Australia and Papua New Guinea."
Stoneking and Wilson were heavily sarcastic about the
"one people" thesis:
It has been proposed that Australia may have been
colonized by a very small number of females, perhaps even
by a single pregnant female who floated to Australia on a
log. The mtDNA results contradict this assertion; there
must have been at least 15 pregnant females that floated
across! [45]
In his last book in 1993, Birdsell predicted that a
crucial test of his theory would be a comparison of the
mitochondrial lineages of the populations of New Guinea
and Aboriginal Australia, especially if
descendants of the Cairns rainforest people and
Tasmanians were included. [46] While there has not been
research that has specifically included these last two
groups, there was a study in 1999 that went some of the
way towards testing the hypothesis. It was conducted by
Mark Stoneking, now at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, and Alan Redd, an
anthropologist from Pensylvania State University.
This time, their mtDNA analysis was done on a larger
population of 319. Samples were taken from Australian
Aborigines and people from the highlands and coastal
regions of Papua New Guinea. The Aborigines comprised 105
individuals from northwest Australia (Great Sandy Desert
and Kimberley regions) and 95 from Arnhem Land.
The study found there was a great evolutionary gap
between the Aborigines and the New Guinea highlanders. It
showed that the Aborigines of the north and northwest
were comparatively recent arrivals and derived from the
same ancestral population as the people of southern
India. The New Guinea highlanders, however, had a
completely different and much older ancestry. The
highlanders, in fact, still retained some genetic links
direct with Africa. Stoneking and Redd went out of their
way to point out that this pattern fitted the mode of
settlement of ancient Australia proposed by Tindale and
Birdsell:

These findings are somewhat consistent with Birdsell's
trihybrid model for the peopling ofSahul [ancient Greater
Australia], a model that is based on morphological
variation . Birdsell hypothesized that Oceanic
"Negritos" first populated Sahul, but that two
later migrations replaced most of them in Australia but
not in the Cairns area of northeast Queensland or in
Tasmania and New Guinea
The gene tree in the
present study shows that the PNG3 cluster shares sites
with African sequences, a
finding that may be consistent with Birdsell's
first-migration hypothesis. Our results also suggest that
there may have been a migration(s) from an Indian source
that reached Australia but not PNG. [47]
However, they went on to argue that, while these findings
were consistent with the Negrito hypothesis, they could
not find two separate migratory groups that would confirm
the distinction between the Murrayians and Carpentarians.
Although their study again found multiple migrations in
the peopling of Sahul, there was no mtDNA distinction
between the Aborigines they tested from northwest
Australia and those from Arnhem Land. Rather, both types
showed an ancestry that, although from substantially
mixed populations, had links with the Hindu castes of
southern India. Nonetheless, this research still left
much of Tindale and Birdsell's original theory intact. It
found some correlation between their morphological
observations and the genetic evidence. There was a
strong connection between the people of India and
northern Australia and there was still the possibility of
an ancient Negrito migration all the way from Africa to
Tasmania.
In 1974, when Lanarch and Macintosh announced that their
craniological study had concluded the Cairns rainforest
people were no different to those of other Queensland
Aborigines, they emphasized their interpretation was not
biased by any prejudice against the Tindale and Birdsell
theory. "If we had found negrito evidence in the
Cairns rainforest crania," they said, "it would
have been shouted from the housetops." [48] Given
the propensity of Australian prehistorians to attract
considerable media attention to their major discoveries,
such as the skeletons at Lake Mungo, we do not doubt
them.
This is in stark contrast, however, to the response over
the past decade to the findings of Mark Stoneking and his
colleagues. Here we have had one of the world's leading
geneticists announcing results that have dispelled a
number of hypotheses about Australian origins and partly
endorsed one of the most intriguing of them. Yet, this
time, no one has been shouting from the housetops.
Indeed, as far as we are aware, the academics of our
anthropological community have not, in public, made
even a murmur.
Linguistics: The field of linguistics is far from being
as blank a slate as the major Australian anthropological
textbooks would have us believe. The question of whether
the Cairns rainforest people spoke a unique Negrito
language was thought to have been decided in the 1960s
and 70s
when Arthur Capell and R. M. W. Dixon argued that they
shared speech characteristics with other non-pygmoid
Queensland Aboriginal languages. [49] However, processes
of language flow and language replacement mean even
comparatively isolated peoples eventually merge some of
their speech with geographic neighbours, so a lack of
linguistic uniqueness need not decide the issue.
Moreover, there are some internationally recognized
linguists who have since proposed classifications that
give some support to the Tindale and Birdsell thesis.
One of these was Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University
who, until his death last year, was one of the best-known
scholars in the field. In 1971 he proposed his
"Indo-Pacific Hypothesis" in which he argued
that there was a linguistic trail that followed the route
that Tindale and Birdsell thought the Negritos had
originally taken from the Andaman Islands, through New
Guinea, to Tasmania. He acknowledged that the Tasmanian
linguistic data was incomplete because, while it included
vocabulary, it provided little grammatical information.
Nonetheless his broad classification of world languages
held that, apart from those of the mainland Australian
Aborigines and the more recent "Austronesian"
languages of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, there was a
correlation between linguistic patterns and Negrito
migration. Greenberg wrote:
The evidence presented here is intended to
demonstrate that the bulk of non-Austronesian languages
of Oceania from the Andaman Islands on the west in the
Bay of Bengal to Tasmania in the southeast forms a single
group of genetically related languages for which the name
Indo-Pacific is proposed. [50]
Unfortunately, Greenberg did not have any evidence before
him about the rainforest people, so he could not comment
on whether they fitted into his Indo-Pacific Hypothesis
or not.
In 1987, Greenberg's Stanford colleague, Merritt Ruhlen,
classified Australian mainland Aboriginal languages in a
way that bore some similarities to a different aspect of
the trihybrid theory. In his massive, three-volume study,
A Guide to the World's Languages, Ruhlen made a broad
division between the Pama-Nyungan subgroup, which is
found in the east, south and west of the Australian
mainland, and the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern
and northwestern Australia. [51] At least two reviews of
the literature in the past decade have observed that this
partition corresponds, very roughly, to Tindale and
Birdsell's division between the more recently arrived
northerners, the Carpentarians, and the older indigenous
people, the Murrayians. [52]

Moreover, one of these reviews by Peter Bellwood of the
Australian National University points out that there is a
correlation between this linguistic divide and a
"veritable efflorescence" of innovative stone
tool technology in the north of the continent about 6000
years ago. The dingo, originally a hunting dog, appears
to have arrived at about the same time. Bellwood
comments:
There are both linguistic and biological data which could
indicate the
arrival of new populations in Australia during the
Holocene [the last
10,000 years], and the evidence of these microlithic
tools in Australia
may point towards the same conclusion. [53]
In other words, the evidence connecting linguistics,
stone tools and
migration provides some circumstantial support to the
trihybrid thesis.
On its own, however, the field of linguistics is unlikely
to shed a great deal of light on this issue. One of the
leading paleo-linguists, Johanna Nichols, says language
relationships are difficult to trace beyond 8000 years of
separate evolution. [54] Since habitation and population
divergence in Australia long precedes this date,
linguistic evidence is unlikely to resolve the problem of
Australian origins either way.
Human evolution: As we have noted, the supporters of the
"one people" thesis characteristically explain
away any differences found within the Aboriginal
population in terms of local evolution. For instance, the
Tasmanians had frizzy hair rather than the wavy variety
that prevailed on the mainland, so this must have evolved
locally after the Tasmanians were separated from the rest
of the population when Bass Strait formed about 8000
years ago. The most commonly advocated mechanisms through
which this evolution might have occurred are
"founder effect" and "genetic drift".
[55] This means that, if a group of people becomes
isolated from the rest of the population, the particular
genetic characteristics of these founders will become
dominant in their offspring. Random genetic change, which
occurs all the time, will thus operate on this group
differently to the wider population, which has the
numbers and enough diversity to smooth out fluctuations
of this kind.
Though plausible in explaining, in general, how
evolutionary change can occur in isolated groups, this
approach has some very big problems when it tries to
account for the emergence of Negrito features. As we
noted earlier, Tindale and Birdsell identified Negrito
characteristics in at least seven different populations
inhabiting a geographic arc from the Bay of Bengal to the
eastern islands of Melanesia. They explained these
populations as remnants of an ancient migration, an
account that has all the virtues of Occam's Razor. In
contrast, the proponents of founder effect and genetic
drift have to argue that each of these isolated
populations, completely independently and quite
coincidentally, developed the very same features of small
stature, slender build, frizzy hair, and half a dozen
other morphological similarities such as skin and hair
colour, teeth patterns and the like. This is a highly
implausible scenario.
To many lay observers, one obvious evolutionary influence
could appear to be the environment. Because these people
inhabited dense tropical rainforests, there might be the
same processes of selection and adaptation at work as
those that produced not only pygmy humans in the African
Congo but also pygmy elephants and pygmy deer. The
problem with this argument in the Australian context is
that only one particular region of tropical jungle
produced human pygmies. The Aborigines of the
equally-dense Daintree rainforest to the north of Cairns,
for instance, are not especially short in stature but
have a similar range of height to those in the rest of
Australia. The same is true of people from other
Australian rainforest regions. If most rainforests did
not produce
pygmies, an environmental explanation is hard to sustain.
Moreover, the environment cannot account for the
Tasmanians. Their ecosystem was not tropical jungle but,
since the end of the last ice age, a temperate maritime
environment. Apart from the west coast, Tasmania has one
of the most people-friendly climates in the world. Yet
this environment, too, harboured people with some Negrito
morphological features. Even in the Congo, recent
research suggests an environmental account is unlikely
since the original ancestral homeland of the African
pygmies, the Bambuti, now appears to have been not jungle
but mixed forest and savanna, from which they were forced
by the expansion of neighbouring Bantu people. [56]
Although Tindale and Birdsell were, for the most part,
well mannered towards their critics, Birdsell was not
averse to taking them on. He was especially miffed when
the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies sponsored
a conference in 1974 on "The Origin of the
Australians", which he felt was set up to bury him
and his ideas. This conference, he later objected,
"made no real contribution to the topic in spite of
the presence of 26 researchers of international stature
using a wide variety
of techniques and data". [57]
In his last book, Microevolutionary Patterns in
Aboriginal Australia, published in 1993 when he was 85,
he poured scorn on those physical anthropologists who
ventured into evolutionary theory without any background
in the field. When they invoked evolutionary explanations
like founder effect and genetic drift against him, he
regarded them as blundering into his own territory where
they were out of their depth.
Genetic drift, in fact, had originally been named the
"Sewall Wright effect" after its originator,
who was Birdsell's principal theoretical mentor. Birdsell
maintained his critics did not understand how to apply
the concept. None of their claims about local evolution
were based on calculations of how much time was required
for genetic drift to produce evolutionary change. In
Australia, there had been insufficient time, he argued,
for genetic drift to produce the degree of morphological
diversity observed within the Aboriginal population. His
critics were simply sweeping everything under one
convenient theoretical carpet:
Their intellectual bulwark consists of an elastic and
untestable hypothesis. They presume that the
microevolutionary forces of selection, mutation and
stochastic processes of intergenerational drift and
founder effect suffice in the time available to produce
all of the regional variation now evident in the
Aborigines. This view is held by archaeologists as a
group, and by anatomists and craniologists.
Numerically, this consensus is impressive. But none of
the advocates are in a position to contribute
substantively to testing the action of any of the various
microevolutionary forces invoked
None are equipped
to judge microevolutionary processes or the implications
of regional variations. [58]
In short, none of the explanations advanced by Tindale
and Birdsell's opponents provide a credible account of
the evolutionary processes that produced indigenous
Australians with pygmoid status and Negrito features. Nor
can they even begin to explain the physical similarities
between them and people in South East Asia and Melanesia.
Obviously, this is not proof that the trihybrid theory is
right but it does mean its major rival is, on yet another
score, seriously flawed.
Overall, it is hard not to be skeptical about the
"one people" hypothesis. It is disputed by
recent genetic studies, by the inadequacies of both its
craniological measurements and its evolutionary
theory, and by its inherent implausibility.
As recently as the 1950s, the anthropological community
thought that Australia had only been occupied for about
8000 years, a belief that gave the hypothesis some
credibility. Now, however, we have evidence of human
habitation extending for more than 40,000 years. For at
least 30,000 of these years, recurring ice ages raised
and lowered the sea levels between Australia and Asia,
eliminating the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait more than
once and reducing the furthest distance needed to cross
deep water between Asia and either northwest Australia or
western New Guinea to less than 100 kilometres.
If one group of hunter-gatherers could make this journey
early in the piece, it beggars all belief that none
others could do the same over the subsequent 30,000
years. Indeed, as the evidence of the arrival of the
dingo and the introduction of a whole new technology of
stone tools 6000 years ago would suggest, hunter-gatherer
peoples could make the crossing even when sea levels were
not much lower than they are today.
In the process of establishing a better account of the
origins of the first Australians, we would hope to see
scholarship in the future eschewing political connections
and proceeding unconstrained by the
ideology of the current generation of radical Aboriginal
activists. No scholar should be party to the cover-up
that has prevailed for the past thirty years about the
people of the North Queensland rainforests. Even though,
as we have acknowledged, academic anthropologists arrived
at their own theory of homogeneity before any political
pressures emerged, the fact that the Australian pygmies
have today been so thoroughly expunged from public memory
suggests an indecent concurrence between scholarly and
political interests.
Dr
Alan Thorne's theory of Regional Continuity
raises some interesting questions concerning the
evolution of Homo sapiens. i.e.that Regional
Continuity is by far the simpler theory and can
much more comfortably account for all the
complicated twists and turns in the genetic
evidence of human evolution now coming to light.
"It argues that what is going on today is
what has been going on for 2 million years, that
the processes we see today are what have been
going on in human populations for a very long
time. You don't need a new species that has to
extinguish all the other populations in the
world. This is why Out-of-Africa is the
impossible, and Regional Continuity is not only
not improbable but the answer and the
truth." www.bradshawfoundation.com/.../not-africa.html |
The story of human habitation of this continent is not
the exclusive property of anyone. It should be the
concern of all of us, black and white, to ensure it is
told as openly and as truthfully as possible.
Postscript: What eventually happened to the Cairns
rainforest people? The settlement at Yarrabah still
exists at Cape Grafton. After 1897 it was not confined to
the local people but accommodated Aborigines from all
over North Queensland. The missionaries deliberately
disrupted traditional tribal betrothals so that a fair
amount of inter-marriage took place. It ceased to be a
mission in 1960 when it was taken over by the Queensland
Government. In 1986 it became a self-governing Aboriginal
community but by then a large number of residents had
left. [59]
Mona Mona mission continued until 1962 when it was closed
down. Its residents were dispersed to other Aboriginal
reserves and into the general population. Some former
residents now living at Kuranda want the original mission
land returned to them. [60]
Today, there are 14,700 Aboriginal people living in the
Cairns region. [61] We presume a good proportion of them
must be descendants of the original Kongkandji, Barbaram,
Indindji and Djabuganjdji tribes. For those who want to
pursue the question, Norman Tindale's genealogical
records can now be consulted in a special indigenous
family history section at the South Australian Museum.

Aboriginal
"x-ray style" figure. Kakadu National Park,
Northern Territory, Australia.
Notes
1. C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia: From the
Earliest Times to
the Age of Macquarie, Volume 1, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne,
1962, pp 3-4
2. David Gordon (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal
Australia,
Aborigines Studies Press, Canberra, 1994, Volume 1, p
296, Volume 2, pp
673, 922-3, 1223
3. Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime: The
story of
prehistoric Australia and its people, Angus and
Robertson, Sydney, 1999
edition, p 74; John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga,
Prehistory of
Australia, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1999, p 154
4. Ronald M. and Catherine H. Berndt, The World of the
First
Australians, fifth edition, Aboriginal Studies Press,
Canberra, 1999, p 13
5. Christine Halse, The Reverend Ernest Gribble and Race
Relations in
Northern Australia, PhD thesis, Department of History,
University of
Queensland, 1992, pp 57-82
6. Judy Thomson (ed.) Reaching Back: Queensland
Aboriginal people recall
early days at Yarrabah Mission, Aboriginal Studies Press,
1989, p 10
7. Norman Tindale and H. A Lindsay, Aboriginal
Australians, Jacaranda
Press, Brisbane, 1963, p 29; John Greenway, Down Among
the Wild Men,
Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, 1972, pp 37-8
8. Griffith Taylor, Environment and Race: A study of the
evolution,
migration, settlement and status of the race of man,
Oxford University
Press, London, 1927. The Negrito hypothesis probably
originated with
Charles Darwin's colleague, Thomas Huxley, who in papers
in the 1870s
pointed to the similarities of people in the Andaman
Islands, the
Malayan Peninsula, the Philippines, New Caledonia and
Tasmania, of 'men
with dark skins and woolly hair who constitute a special
modification of
the Negroid type - the Negritos': cited by H. Ling Roth,
The Aborigines
of Tasmania, F. King and Sons, Halifax, 1899, pp 221
9. Norman B. Tindale and Joseph B. Birdsell,
"Results of the
Harvard-Adelaide Universities Anthropological Expedition,
1938-1939:
Tasmanoid Tribes in North Queensland", Records of
the South Australian
Museum, 7 (1), 1941-3, pp 1-9
10. Tindale and Lindsay, Aboriginal Australians,
Jacaranda Press,
Brisbane, 1963, p 30
11. Joseph Birdsell, "A preliminary report on the
trihybrid origin of
the Australian aborigines", American Journal of
Physical Anthropology,
28 (3), 1941, p 6
12. Reported in Tindale and Birdsell, "Tasmanoid
Tribes in North
Queensland,"; J. B. Birdsell, "Preliminary data
on the trihybrid origin
of the Australian Aborigines", Archaeology and
Physical Anthropology in
Oceania, 2 (2), 1967, pp 100-55; Joseph B. Birdsell,
Microevolutionary
Patterns in Aboriginal Australia, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1993
13. J. B. Birdsell and W. Boyd, "Blood groups in the
Australian
Aborigines", American Journal of Physical
Anthropology, 27, 1940, pp
69-90; Norman Tindale, "Tribal and intertribal
marriage among the
Australian Aborigines", Human Biology, 25 (3), 1953,
pp 169-90
14. Joseph Birdsell, "Results of the
Harvard-Adelaide Universities
Anthropological Expedition, 1938-39: The racial origins
of the extinct
Tasmanians", Records of the Queen Victoria Museum,
II (3), 1949, pp
105-22; J. B. Birdsell, Human Evolution: An Introduction
to the New
Physical Anthropology, Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1972),
1981 edn., pp 372-3
15. Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal
Australia, p 23
16. Tindale and Lindsay, Aboriginal Australians, pp 34-49
17. Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal
Australia, pp
xvii-xviii
18. Sewall Wright, Evolution and Genetics of Populations,
Volume 4,
Variability Within and Among Natural Populations,
University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1978, p 452
19. H. Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, F. King and
Sons, Halifax,
1899, pp 221-8
20. S. L. Larnach, "The origin of the Australian
Aboriginal",
Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, IX (3),
October 1974,
p 206
21. Greenway, Down Among the Wild Men, p 38
22. Clark, History of Australia, pp 3-4, n 2
23. Norman Tindale and H. A. Lindsay, The First
Walkabout, Longmans
Green, London, 1954, p 123
24. Norman B. Tindale and Beryl George, The Australian
Aborigines,
Golden Press, Sydney, 1971
25. Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, p 74
26. Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, p 155
27. Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, pp
154-5
28. Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, p 74
29. Phillip J. Habgood, "The origin of the
Australians: A multivariate
approach", Archaeology in Oceania, 21 (2), July
1986, p 136. This
statement cited by Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, p
73
30. Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, p 155
31. Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, p 74
32. Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, p 155
33. Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, p 73, citing
Habgood, "The
origin of the Australians", p 136
34. Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, p 74
35. Birdsell, "Results of the Harvard-Adelaide
expedition: Racial
origins of the extinct Tasmanians", p 116
36. S. L. Larnach and N. W. G. Macintosh, The Craniology
of the
Aborigines of Queensland, Oceania Monographs, No 15,
Sydney, 1970, pp
65-8, 69
37. N. W. G. Macintosh and S. L. Larnach,
"Aboriginal affinities looked
at in world context", in R. L. Kirk and A. G. Thorne
(eds.), The Origin
of the Australians, Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies,
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1976, p 113
38. Macintosh and Larnach, "Aboriginal affinities
looked at in world
context", p 122
39. Larnach, "The origin of the Australian
Aboriginal", p 208
40. R. T. Simmons, "Blood group genetic studies in
the Cape York area",
in R. L. Kirk (ed.), The Human Biology of Aborigines in
Cape York,
Australian Aboriginal Studies No. 44, Human Biology
Series No. 5,
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra,
1973, p 23
41. Simmons, "Blood group genetic studies in the
Cape York area", p 23, n 1
42. Rebecca L. Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan C. Wilson,
"Mitochondrial
DNA and Human Evolution", Nature, 325 (1987), pp
31-6
43. M. Stoneking and A. C. Wilson, "Mitochondrial
DNA", in Adrian V. S.
Hill and Susan W. Serjeantson (eds.), The Colonization of
the Pacific: A
Genetic Trail, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989
44. Stoneking and Wilson, "Mitochondrial DNA",
p 228
45. Stoneking and Wilson, "Mitochondrial DNA",
pp 231, 239
46. Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal
Australia, p 452
47. Alan J. Redd and Mark Stoneking, "Peopling of
Sahul: mtDNA variation
in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean
Populations", American
Journal of Human Genetics, 65, 1999, pp 808-828
48. Larnach and Macintosh, "Aboriginal affinities
looked at in world
context", p 114
49. A. Capell, A New Approach to Australian Linguistics,
Oceania
Linguistic Monographs, Sydney, 1966; R. M. W. Dixon, The
Dyirbal
Language of North Queensland, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1972
50. J. H. Greenberg, "The Indo-Pacific
Hypothesis", Current Trends in
Linguistics, 8, 1971, pp 807, 854
51. Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's Languages,
Stanford
University Press, Stanford, 1987, pp 184-9
52. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto
Piazza, The
History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton
University Press,
Princeton, 1994, pp 349-51; P. S. Bellwood, "The
colonization of the
Pacific: some current hypotheses", in Hill and
Serjeantson, The
Colonization of the Pacific: A Genetic Trail, pp 18-32
53. Bellwood, "The colonization of the Pacific: some
current
hypotheses", p 37
54. Johanna Nichols, "The spread of language around
the Pacific rim",
Evolutionary Anthropology, 3, 1994, pp 206-15
55. Habgood, "The origins of the Australians: A
multivariate approach",
p 136
56. John Reader, Man on Earth, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1988, pp 149-51
57. Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal
Australia, p 23
58. Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal
Australia, p 23
59. Judy Thomson (ed.) Reaching Back: Queensland
Aboriginal People
Recall Early Days at Yarrabah Mission, Aboriginal Studies
Press,
Canberra, 1989
60. Timothy Bottoms, Djabugay Country: An Aboriginal
History of Tropical
North Queensland, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1999.
61. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census 1996:
Population
Distribution, Indigenous Australians, Cat. no. 4705.0, p
34
© 2005 Keith Windschuttle
From: Don <NX7933@hotmail.com>
Peter Myers, 381 Goodwood Rd, Childers 4660, Australia ph
+61 7 41262296
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers
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