| Abstract: |
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, European explorers recorded people of unusually short stature, dark skin and woolly hair, first in the Philippines, then in the Andaman Islands, the Malay Peninsula, and southern Cambodia. Most of the Negritos (as they came to be called) survived by hunting and gathering in the rainforest, in contrast to the farming and gardening economies of the great majority of Southeast Asians. The Negritos were regularly compared with African pygmies or Negrillos, and the Papuan inhabitants of New Guinea, in various late nineteenth and early twentieth century treatises on the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia. Early scholars widely agreed that the Negritos were the dispersed remnants of the first race of humans to colonize Australasia, before the intrusion of later immigrants restricted these original inhabitants to their last refuges. Traces of this view persist in Joseph Birdsells (1993) belief in a Negrito substratum in Aboriginal Australia. The distinctiveness of the Negritos distinguishing traits in a Southeast Asian context is clear enough. Coiled or woolly hair, which is usually absent or rare northwest of Sumba and Flores, occurs at approximately 50% frequency among the Saoch of Southern Cambodia, and exceeds 90% in its frequency among the Luzon, West Malaysian and Andaman Negritos (figure 1). Negrito male stature averages at around 150 cm, varying between 146 cm (Andamanese, Zambales Aeta) and 154 cm (Lanoh, Malaysia) for samples with 40 plus measurements. Negrito females average around 10 cm less (Table 1). In other equivalently sampled Southeast Asian ethnic groups, males average between 154 and 165 cm, and females between 144 and 154 cm (Oliver 1956
van der Eng unpublished data). Objective measurements of Negrito skin colour, using either Luschan tablets or reflectance spectrophotometry, have apparently not been published, but anecdotal evidence suggests darker shades than the medium brown tones which dominate between Indochina and Sulawesi (Robins 1991: Fig. 11.1).
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