Australo-Melanesian

Australo-Melanesians (also known as Australasians or Australomelanesoid race or Australoid race) is an outdated historical grouping of various people indigenous to Melanesia and Australia. Groups that were controversially included are found in parts of Southeast Asia, and South Asia.

Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (1885–1890)
ethnographic map

Caucasoid:   Aryans   Semitic   Hamitic Negroid:   African Negro   Khoikhoi   Melanesian   Negrito   Australoid Uncertain:   Dravida & Sinhalese

Mongoloid:   North Mongol   Chinese & Indochinese   Korean & Japanese   Tibetan & Burmese   Malay   Polynesian   Maori   Micronesian   Eskimo & Inuit   American

The group included Papuans, Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians (mainly from Fiji, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu).

The populations grouped as "Negrito" (the Andamanese (from an Indian archipelago), the Semang and Batek peoples (from Malaysia), the Maniq people (from Thailand), the Aeta people, the Ati people, and certain other ethnic groups in the Philippines), the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and a number of dark-skinned tribal populations in the interior of the Indian subcontinent (some Dravidian-speaking groups and Austroasiatic-speaking peoples, like the Munda people) are also suggested by some to belong to the Australo-Melanesian group,[1] but there are controversies about this inclusion.[2]

The term Australoid belongs to a set of terms introduced by 19th-century anthropologists attempting to categorize human races. Some claim such terms are associated with outdated notions of racial types, and so are now potentially offensive.[3][4][5]

Terminological history

The term "Australoid" was coined in ethnology in the mid 19th century, describing tribes or populations "of the type of native Australians".[6] The term "Australioid race" was introduced by Thomas Huxley in 1870 to refer to certain peoples indigenous to South and Southeast Asia and Oceania.[7] In physical anthropology, Australoid is used for morphological features characteristic of Aboriginal Australians by Daniel John Cunningham in his Text-book of Anatomy (1902). An Australioid (sic, with an additional -i-) racial group was first proposed by Thomas Huxley in an essay On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind (1870), in which he divided humanity into four principal groups (Xanthochroic, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australioid).[8] Huxley's original model included the native inhabitants of South Asia under the Australoid category. Huxley further classified the Melanochroi (Peoples of the Mediterranean race) as a mixture of the Xanthochroi (northern Europeans) and Australioids.[9]

Huxley (1870) described Australioids as dolichocephalic; their hair as usually silky, black and wavy or curly, with large, heavy jaws and prognathism, with skin the color of chocolate and irises which are dark brown or black.[10]

The term "Proto-Australoid" was used by Roland Burrage Dixon in his Racial History of Man (1923). In a 1962 publication, Australoid was described as one of the five major human races alongside Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Congoid and Capoid.[11] In The Origin of Races (1962), Carleton Coon attempted to refine such scientific racism by introducing a system of five races with separate origins. Based on such evidence as claiming Australoids had the largest, megadont teeth, this group was assessed by Coon as being the most archaic and therefore the most primitive and backward. Coon's methods and conclusions were later discredited and show either a "poor understanding of human cultural history and evolution or his use of ethnology for a racialist agenda."[4] Bellwood (1985) uses the terms "Australoid", "Australomelanesoid" and "Australo-Melanesians" to describe the genetic heritage of "the Southern Mongoloid populations of Indonesia and Malaysia".[12]

Terms associated with outdated notions of racial types, such as those ending in "-oid" have come to be seen as potentially offensive[13] and related to scientific racism.[4][5]

Controversies

Inclusion

The populations grouped as "Negrito" (the Andamanese (from an Indian archipelago), the Semang and Batek peoples (from Malaysia), the Maniq people (from Thailand), the Aeta people, the Ati people, and certain other ethnic groups in the Philippines), the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and a number of dark-skinned tribal populations in the interior of the Indian subcontinent (some Dravidian-speaking groups and Austroasiatic-speaking peoples, like the Munda people) are also suggested by some to belong to the Australo-Melanesian group,[1][14] but there are controversies about this inclusion.

Research involving cranial morphology, made by Indian anthropologists, however, suggests that the South Asian Indian populations have different cranial characteristics from Australoid groups. This difference has possibly been strengthened in recent times due to intermarriage with peoples of different origins.[15][2][1][14] A genetic study in 1985 suggested connections between tribal peoples of Southern India and Sri Lanka and Negrito populations of the Philippines and Malaysia.[16] Genetic studies have also found evidence of shared ancestry between Andaman Islanders and a genetic component found in peoples of the Indian subcontinent.[17]

Distribution

Further information: Aboriginal Australians, Melanesians, Papuans, and Negrito

Besides the Papuans, Australian Aboriginals and, Melanesians, the "Australoid" category is sometimes taken to include various tribes of India and Negritos.

The inclusion of Indian tribes in the group is not well-defined, and is closely related to the question of the original peopling of India, and the possible shared ancestry between Indian, Andamanese, and Sahulian populations of the Upper Paleolithic.

The suggested Australo-Melanesian ancestry of the original South Asian populations has long remained an open question. It was embraced by Indian anthropologists as emphasizing the deep antiquity of Indian prehistory. Australo-Melanesian hunter-gatherer and fisherman tribes of the interior of India were identified with the Nishada Kingdom described in the Mahabharata. Panchanan Mitra (1923) following Vincenzo Giuffrida-Ruggeri (1913) recognizes a Pre-Dravidian Australo-Veddaic stratum in India.[18]

Alternatively, the Dravidians themselves have been claimed as originally of Australo-Melanesian stock,[19] a view held by Biraja Sankar Guha among others.[20]

South Indian tribes specifically described as having Australo-Melanesian affinities include the Oraon, Munda, Santal, Bhil, Gondi, the Kadars of Kerala, the Kurumba and Irula of the Nilgiris, the Paniyans of Malabar, the Uralis, Kannikars, Mithuvan and Chenchus.[21].

But other Indian anthropologists of the post-colonial period, such as S. P. Sharma (1971) and D. N. Majumdar (1946, 1965), have gone as far as claiming Australo-Melanesian ancestry, to a greater or lesser extent, for almost all the castes and tribes of India.[22][2]

Individuals with Australo-Melanesian phenotypes existed possibly also in East Asia (in and toward the south of East Asia) at least since Middle Paleolithic, such as Liujiang but were largely displaced by migrations of Eastern Eurasian rice farmers since Neolithic, who may have spread from Siberia or Central China to Southeastern Asia during Mesolithic and Neolithic and after adopting farming to the rest of Southeast Asia and Oceania.[23][24]

Physical features

Further information: Sinodonty and Sundadonty

In physical anthropology, the Australo-Melanesian group is characterized primarily by its characteristic dental morphology.[25] In Java, "Australo-Melanesian dentitions" are found in fossils until the mid-Holocene (c. 5,000 years ago), but are replaced by modern "Southern Mongoloid dentitions" (Sundadonty) in the Neolithic, suggesting the displacement and assimilation of the aboriginal Australo-Melanesian population by the Austronesian expansion.[26]

Criticism based on modern genetics

See also: Race and genetics

After discussing various criteria used in biology to define subspecies or races, Alan R. Templeton concludes in 2016: "[T]he answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no."[27]^:360

See also

• Austronesian peoples
• Melanesians
• Negrito
• Andamanese
• Aboriginal Australians
• Papuans

References

1. Pullaiah, T; Krishnamurthy, KV; Bahadur, Bir (2017). Ethnobotany of India, Volume 5: The Indo-Gangetic Region and Central India. p. 26. ISBN 9781351741316. names the tribes of Chota Nagpur, the Baiga, Gond, Bhil, Santal and Oroan tribes; counted as of partial Australoid and partial Mongoloid ancestry are certain Munda-speaking groups (Munda, Bonda, Gadaba, Santals) and certain Dravidian-speaking groups (Maria, Muria, Gond, Oroan).
2. Kulatilake, Samanti. "Cranial Morphology of the Vedda people - the indigenes of Sri Lanka". Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
3. Black, Sue; Ferguson, Eilidh (2011). Forensic Anthropology: 2000 to 2010. Taylor and Francis Group. p. 127. ISBN 9781439845899. Retrieved 3 July 2018.
4. Fluehr-Lobban, C. (2005). Race and racism : an Introduction. Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 131–133. ISBN 9780759107953.
5. "Ask Oxford – Definition of Australoid". Oxford Dictionary of English. 2018. Retrieved 2018-06-28.
6. J.R. Logan (ed.), The Journal of the Indian archipelago and eastern Asia (1859), p. 68.
7. Pearson, Roger (1985). Anthropological Glossary. Krieger Publishing Company. pp. 20, 128, 267. Retrieved 2 February 2018.
8. Huxley, Thomas On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind. 1870. August 14, 2006
9. Huxley, Thomas. On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind. 1870. August 14, 2006.
10. Huxley, T. H. "On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind" (1870) Journal of the Ethnological Society of London
11. Moore, Ruth Evolution (Life Nature Library) New York:1962 Time, Inc. Chapter 8: "The Emergence of Modern Homo sapiens" Page 173 – First page of picture section "Man and His Genes": "The Australoid race is identified as one of the five major races of mankind, along with the Mongoloid, Congoid, Caucasoid, and Capoid races (pictures of a person typical of each race are shown)"
12. Bellwood, Peter (1985). Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago. Australian National University. ISBN 978-1-921313-11-0.
13. Black, Sue; Ferguson, Eilidh (2011). Forensic Anthropology: 2000 to 2010. Taylor and Francis Group. p. 127. ISBN 9781439845899. Retrieved 3 July 2018. "There are considered to be four basic ancestry groups into which an individual can be placed by physical appearance, not accounting for admixture: the sub-Saharan African group ("Negroid"), the European group ("Caucasoid"), the Central Asian group ("Mongoloid"), and the Australasian group ("Australoid"). The rather outdated names of all but one of these groups were originally derived from geography"
14. Coon, Carleton Stevens (1939). The Races of Europe. New York: The Macmillan Company. pp. 425–431.
15. Reich, David; Pinhasi, Ron; Frachetti, Michael; Kennett, Douglas; Thangaraj, Kumarasmy; Boivin, Nicole; Anthony, David; Meyer, Matthias; Lalueza-Fox, Carles (2018-03-31). "The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia". bioRxiv: 292581. doi:10.1101/292581.
16. ELLEPOLA, SB (1985). "A Genetic study of the Veddas of Sri Lanka". Hellis Digital Repository, Sri Lanka. Archived from the original on 2019-03-31. Retrieved 2019-01-20.
17. Reich D, Thangaraj K, Patterson N, Price AL, Singh L (September 2009). "Reconstructing Indian population history". Nature. 461 (7263): 489–94. Bibcode:2009Natur.461..489R. doi:10.1038/nature08365. PMC 2842210. PMID 19779445.
18. P. Mitra, Prehistoric India (1923), p. 48.
19. Sarat Chandra Roy (Ral Bahadur) (2000). Man in India - Volume 80. A. K. Bose. p. 59. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
20. R. R. Bhattacharya et al. (eds., Anthropology of B.S. Guha: a centenary tribute (1996), p. 50.
21. Mhaiske, Vinod M., Patil, Vinayak K., Narkhede, S. S., Forest Tribology And Anthropology (2016), p. 5. Bhuban Mohan Das, The Peoples of Assam (1987), p. 78.
22. cited after Bhuban Mohan Das, The Peoples of Assam (1987), 77f. "Majumder also subscribes to this view by saying that 'the Australo-Melanesian features are found throughout the length and breadth of Indian subcontinent 90% of Indian racial genetics population.
23. Matsumura, H.; Hung, H. C.; Higham, C.; Zhang, C.; Yamagata, M.; Nguyen, L. C.; Li, Z.; Fan, X. C.; Simanjuntak, T.; Oktaviana, A. A.; He, J. N.; Chen, C. Y.; Pan, C. K.; He, G.; Sun, G. P.; Huang, W. J.; Li, X. W.; Wei, X. T.; Domett, K.; Halcrow, S.; Nguyen, K. D.; Trinh, H. H.; Bui, C. H.; Nguyen, K. T.; Reinecke, A. (2019). "Craniometrics Reveal "Two Layers" of Prehistoric Human Dispersal in Eastern Eurasia". Scientific Reports. 9 (1): 1451. Bibcode:2019NatSR...9.1451M. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-35426-z. PMC 6363732. PMID 30723215.
24. Oxenham, Marc; Tayles, Nancy (2006-04-20). Bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia - Google Books. ISBN 9780521825801.
25. G. Richard Scott, Christy G. Turner II, Grant C. Townsend, María Martinón-Torres, "The Anthropology of Modern Human Teeth: Dental Morphology and Its Variation in Recent and Fossil Homo Sapiens", Cambridge University Press (2018), p. 260.
26. S. Noerwidi, "Using Dental Metrical Analysis to Determine the Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene Population History of Java", in: Philip J. Piper, Hirofumi Matsumura, David Bulbeck (eds.), New Perspectives in Southeast Asian and Pacific Prehistory (2017), p. 92.
27. Templeton, A. (2016). EVOLUTION AND NOTIONS OF HUMAN RACE. In Losos J. & Lenski R. (Eds.), How Evolution Shapes Our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society (pp. 346-361). Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0s6j.26. That this view reflects the consenus among American anthropologists is stated in: Wagner, Jennifer K.; Yu, Joon-Ho; Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O.; Harrell, Tanya M.; Bamshad, Michael J.; Royal, Charmaine D. (February 2017). "Anthropologists' views on race, ancestry, and genetics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 162 (2): 318–327. doi:10.1002/ajpa.23120. PMC 5299519. PMID 27874171. See also: American Association of Physical Anthropologists (27 March 2019). "AAPA Statement on Race and Racism". American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Retrieved 19 June 2020.