Repost from the old site. Great stuff. Theorizes that the birth of the modern Black race only goes back 6-12,000 years and speculates on how they developed in conjunction with agriculture. Also suggests that Black Africans were probably the first agriculturalists on Earth. Hang out long enough on White Nationalist fora, and after a while you will be amazed at how many White racists actually believe that Black Africans were Stone Age people who had no metalworking, no agriculture and no civilization of any sort by the time the Europeans contacted them. It’s true that Africa is not known for its incredible cultural achievements. But it wasn’t exactly a complete backwater either. The White Nationalist line that Africans were a Paleolithic people with only stone implements and no agriculture is surprisingly widespread. Too bad it is horribly wrong. First of all, agriculture comes to the Sahel as early as 9000 BC. It comes to West Africa around the same time. Later it goes to Southern and Eastern Africa. The “niggers* are too stupid to grow food” line, appalling in its stupidity, continues to retain a lot of currency. Screw that. Africans have been growing food for 1000’s of years. The latest permutation has to do with Zimbabwe. Ruined by US and UK sanctions that have completely shut the nation out of the international trade and banking system, the economy is imploding and people are starving. Instead of blaming imperialism, White racists blame “dumb niggers*” for overthrowing White rule and confiscating White farms where 5,000 White farmers had 5
They need Homo Blancas Superiorus to show them how to plant seeds and hoe rows. Without White Johnny Appleseeds to grow the food for them that they are too stupid to grow for themselves, dumb niggers* will all starve to death. Incredible. All over Africa, there are hardly any Whites left. Blacks are growing food all over Africa, in every country, in vast numbers. Black Africans are surely smart enough to figure out how to grow food to eat. In order to look into this story in greater depth, we need to look at the development of Blacks in Africa from an anthropological point of view. The story of Stone Age Africans with no agriculture until Whitey shows up is nonsense. White Nationalists counter that African Blacks, even over 10,000 years ago, were too stupid to figure out how to grow stuff on their own, so they had to learn from superior Caucasian North Africans. This theory is humorous because in general, White Nationalists refer to North African Caucasians (Berbers and Egyptians) as non-Whites. Furthermore, at over 10,000 years ago, I’m not sure it matters how Black Africans got agriculture. Cultural diffusion occurs everywhere, and true innovation is pretty hard to pin down. Finally, there is not a lot of evidence that North African Caucasians innovated agriculture at such an early date themselves. As a result, the whole discussion is rendered academic as just another way for racist Whites to kick the Black man while he’s down. First of all, the original Africans looked like Pygmies or Khoisan (Bushmen). From 6,000-12,000 years ago, Pygmy-Khoisan types traverse from archaic types to the modern Blacks we know today. Modern Blacks are a young race. Pygmies and Khoisan resemble our oldest human ancestors. They have light brown skin and gracile, child-like bodies. Modern Blacks mostly speak languages related to a huge family called Niger-Congo. During the transition from archaic to modern Blacks, modern Blacks developed agriculture. Blacks had agriculture or proto-agriculture possibly as early as 10,000 years ago when proto-Niger-Congo first started breaking up. This means that Black Africans were actually some of the first agriculturalists on Earth. Sango Region hunter-gatherers were the first Blacks to develop agriculture. At first they protected wild grain fields, and then made clearings for wild yams and oil palms. At 12,000 years before present (YBP) they were already using hoes that they made, and at 8-9,000 YBP, they were tending pili nut trees with agricultural implements. There are agricultural terms in reconstructed proto-Niger-Congo from before 10,000 YBP, so they must have had some form of agriculture. Proto-Mande speakers inhabited the Niger’s headwaters at the Mali-Guinea border near the modern city of Bamako, and that was the first group to break off from proto-Niger-Congo.
The Fouta Djallon Highlands in southeastern Guinea, source of the Niger River. This is probably where Black African agriculture, cultivated by proto-Mande speakers, began over 10,000 years ago.
Modern Black Africans are associated with the spread of agriculture in Africa at this time, and this agricultural spread is also located at the headwaters of the Niger, because this is the cradle of the Sudanic Food Complex. Also, agriculture independently evolved in West Africa (African yams, kola nut) and Ethiopia (coffee, tef) during the period of 4,000-9,000 YBP. Animal husbandry was widely adopted, and by 7,200 YBP, the Sahel had a full array of food production (cultivated crops, animal husbandry) before this full array was developed in Egypt. So the movement of agriculture in its full array from North African Caucasians to Sahelian Blacks is shown to be a lie. It’s true that Africa south of the Equator lagged behind, and White Nationalists love to go about this, but the truth is that there were no animals to domesticate down there, nor were there any plants to domesticate either. It’s doubtful that the Sahelian Blacks were any smarter than the ones south of Equator. They were just better positioned to receive animals for husbandry from Southwest Asia, and they had plants that could be domesticated. Development of agriculture in modern Blacks also seems to have led to high testosterone levels along with more robust body types. See the prior post for more on that. The first real classical Black Negroid skeleton dates to only 6,500 YBP. Before that, at 12,000 YBP, they look more like the San or Pygmies. Within 6,000 years as Africans moved to agriculture, Blacks changed from gracile archaic types to robust Negroid types. At 6,000-7,000 YBP, the agricultural transition was full. In contrast to Afrocentric hokum about Black Athena and Black Egypt, modern Blacks do not appear in Egyptian paintings before 4,000 YBP. Before that, the Blacks in northeast Africa, Nubia and Ethiopia were more gracile San (Bushmen) types. Modern Blacks reach the middle Nile by around 4,000 YBP. At 3,000 YBP, the Bantus spread from Cameroon all through East, Central and Southern Africa, of course bringing agriculture, and yes, iron-making, with them. Nubians do not obtain their modern Black appearance until 2,700 years ago. Before that, the Nubians and presumably the Hamites look like today’s Egyptians. Black populations in Africa do not bode well for Philippe Rushton’s R-K Theory. The oldest African populations of all, the Pygmies and the San, with presumably some of the lowest IQ’s (the San have IQ’s of about 54), are very highly K-selected. They have low fecundity (are not very fertile) and very long intervals between births. This is normally what is expected of a super-K-selected group such as NE Asians, and is said to be associated with high IQ. Yet in the San, it is associated with the lowest IQ’s on Earth. Rushton’s theory does not smell right. *Used sardonically
References
- Rushton, J. P. 1995. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 2nd Special Abridged Edition. Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute.
This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a a contribution to support more of this valuable research.
Development of agriculture in modern Blacks also seems to have led to high testosterone levels. Groups with the highest testosterone in the world today are primitive agriculturalists. Hunter-gatherers tend to have lower testosterone. This is because in hunter-gatherer society, women need men to survive. So they grab one pretty quickly and get married. In primitive agricultural societies, women do not need men, since they can farm on their own. So they can afford to be choosy. These societies have tended to develop in a polygynous way, where a few high-ranking males monopolize most of the females, and the rest of the men get few or none. Sub-Saharan Blacks are highly polygynous, and this resulted in intense competition for fewer women and selection for very robust male body types. SS Blacks are more robust than Whites on all variables. In Namibia, the polygynous Kavango have much higher testosterone than the much less polygynous !Kung. Broadly speaking, lifetime exposure to testosterone is reflected in the incidence of prostate cancer, with the world’s highest incidences being among African-American men (Brawley & Kramer, 1996). It was once thought that lower incidences prevail among Black West Indians and sub-Saharan Africans, but this apparent exception is now ascribed to underreporting (Glover et al., 1998; Ogunbiyi & Shittu, 1999; Osegbe, 1997). This picture has been confirmed by a recent American study:
From the 1970’s to the current statistical analysis of the National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program African-American men have continued to have a significant higher incidence and mortality rate than European-American men. Autopsy studies show a similar prevalence of early small subclinical prostate cancers but a higher prevalence of high grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia.
Clinical studies show a similarity in prostate cancer outcome when pathological stage is organ confined but a worse outcome when disease is locally advanced and metastatic in African-American vs European-American men. There is increasing genetic evidence that suggest that prostate cancer in African-American vs European-American men may be more aggressive, especially in young men.
It was also confirmed by a recent British study (prostate cancer rates are somewhat lower in Black British men because a higher proportion of them have one White parent):
Black men in the United Kingdom have substantially greater risk of developing prostate cancer compared with White men, although this risk is lower than that of Black men in the United States. The similar rates in Black Caribbean and Black African men suggest a common genetic etiology, although migration may be associated with an increased risk attributable to a gene–environment interaction” (Ben-Shlomo et al 2008).
We are only just beginning to identify the actual genes that account for the White/Black difference in prostate cancer risk. The most recent study was Benson 2014. The 2:1 black-to-white ratio in prostate cancer rates is already apparent at age 45 years, the age at which the earliest prostate cancer cases occur. This finding suggests that the factor(s) responsible for the difference in rates occurs, or first occurs, early in life. Black males are exposed to higher testosterone levels from the very start. In a study of women in early pregnancy, Ross found that testosterone levels were 5
Testosterone has been hypothesized to play a role in the etiology of prostate cancer, because testosterone and its metabolite, dihydrotestosterone, are the principal trophic hormones that regulate growth and function of epithelial prostate tissue. Many studies have shown that young Black men have higher testosterone than young White men (Ellis & Nyborg 1992; Ross et al. 1992; Tsai et al. 2006). With respect to the Black/White difference in testosterone level, African Americans have a clear testosterone advantage over Euro-Americans only from puberty to about 24 years of age (Abdelrahaman et al., 2005; Ross et al., 1986; Winters et al., 2001). This advantage then shrinks and eventually disappears at some point during the 30s (Gapstur et al., 2002). The pattern then seems to reverse at older ages. In later years, White men have higher testosterone than Black men (Nyborg, 1994, p. 111-113). This makes it very difficult if not impossible to explain differing behavioral variables, including higher rates of crime and aggression, in Black males over the age of 33 on the basis of elevated testosterone levels. Critics say that more recent studies done since the early 2000’s have shown no differences between Black and White testosterone levels. Perhaps they are referring to recent studies that show lower testosterone levels in adult Blacks than in adult Whites. This was the conclusion of one recent study (Alvergne et al. 2009) which found lower T levels in Senegalese men than in Western men. But these Senegalese men were 38.3 years old on average. These critics may also be referring to various studies by Sabine Rohrmann which show no significance difference in T levels between Black and White Americans. Age is poorly controlled for in her studies. More seriously however, she used serum samples that the National Center for Health Statistics had earlier collected as part of its Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III). Only 1,479 samples were still available out of an initial total of 1,998, i.e., one quarter were missing. An earlier study had used the same serum bank for research on a sexually transmitted disease: Herpes Simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2). That study found that more than 2
Young Black males have higher levels of active testosterone than European and Asian males. Asian levels are about the same as Whites, but a study in Japan with young Japanese men suggested that the Japanese had lower activity of 5-alpha reductase than did U.S. Whites and Blacks (Ross et al 1992). This enzyme metabolizes testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, which is at least eight to 10 times more potent than testosterone. So effectively, Asians have the lower testosterone levels than Blacks and Whites. In addition, androgen receptor sensitivity is highest in Black men, intermediate in Whites and lowest in Asians. Let us look at one study (Ross et al 1986) to see what the findings of a typical study looking for testosterone differences between races shows us. This study gives the results of assays of circulating steroid hormone levels in white and black college students in Los Angeles, CA. Mean testosterone levels in Blacks were 1
Adjustment by analysis of covariance for time of sampling, age, weight, alcohol use, cigarette smoking, and use of prescription drugs somewhat reduced the differences. After these adjustments were made, Blacks had a 1
Higher testosterone levels are linked to violent behavior. James Dabbs, Jr., studied 4,462 men in 1990 and found that “the overall picture among the high-testosterone men is one of delinquency, substance abuse and a tendency toward excess.” These men, he added, “have more trouble with people like teachers while they are growing up, have more sexual partners, are more likely to have gone AWOL in the service and to have used hard drugs,” particularly if they had poor educations and low incomes. A separate study by Dabbs of young male prison inmates found that high testosterone levels were associated with more violent crimes, parole board decisions against release, and more prison rule violations. Even in women, Dabbs found, high testosterone levels were related to crimes of unprovoked violence, increased numbers of prior charges, and decisions against parole. The latest study by Dabbs et al., which pooled data from two groups of prisoners, measured testosterone levels in the saliva of 692 adult male prisoners. The researchers found that inmates who committed crimes of sex and violence had higher testosterone levels than inmates who were incarcerated for property crimes or drug abuse. In addition, they say, “inmates with higher testosterone levels… violated more rules in prison, especially rules involving overt confrontation.” Studies suggest that high testosterone lowers IQ (Ostatnikova et al 2007). Other findings suggest that increased androgen receptor sensitivity and higher sperm counts (markers for increased testosterone) are negatively correlated with intelligence when measured by speed of neuronal transmission and hence general intelligence (g) in a trade-off fashion (Manning 2007). Black females have higher IQ’s than Black males. Black female IQ is 2.4 points higher than Black male IQ. There are twice as many Black females as males with IQ’s over 120 and five times as many females as males with IQ’s over 140. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dr. Peter Frost for his invaluable help in writing this paper.
References
Alvergne, A., C. Faurie, and M. Raymond. 2009. Variation in Testosterone Levels and Male Reproductive Effort: Insight from a Polygynous Human Population. Hormones and Behavior 56: 491-497. Ben-Shlomo, Y. S. Evans, F. Ibrahim, B. Patel, K. Anson, F. Chinegwundoh, C. Corbishley, D. Dorling, B. Thomas and D. Gillatt. 2008. The Risk of Prostate Cancer amongst Black Men in the United Kingdom: The PROCESS Cohort Study. European Urology 53:99-105. Bensen, J. T., Z. Xu, P. M. McKeigue, G. J. Smith, E. T. H. Fontham, J. L. Mohler, and J. A. Taylor. 2014. Admixture Mapping of Prostate Cancer in African Americans Participating in the North Carolina-Louisiana Prostate Cancer Project (PcaP). The Prostate 74: 1–9. Brawley, O. W. & Kramer B. S. 1996. “Epidemiology of Prostate Cancer,” In Volgelsang, N. J., Scardino, P. T., Shipley, W. U., & Coffey, D. S. (eds). Comprehensive Textbook of Genitourinary Oncology. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. Ellis, L. and H. Nyborg. 1992. Racial/Ethnic Variations in Male Testosterone Levels: A Probable Contributor to Group Differences in Health. Steroids 57: 72-75. Gapstur, S. M., P. H. Gann, P. Kopp, L. Colangelo, C. Longcope, and K. Liu. 2002. Serum Androgen Concentrations in Young Men: A Longitudinal Analysis of Associations with Age, Obesity, and Race. The Cardia Male Hormone Study. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention 11:1041-1047. Glover, F. E. Jr., Coffey, D. S., Douglas, L. L., Cadogan, M., Russell, H., Tulloch, T., Baker, T. D., Wan, R. L. & Walsh, P. C. 1998. The Epidemiology of Prostate Cancer in Jamaica. Journal of Urology 159:1984-1986. MacIntosh, Hugh. 1997. Why Do African- American Men Suffer More Prostate Cancer? Journal of the National Cancer Institute 89 (3): 188-189. Nettle, D. 2005. An Evolutionary Approach to the Extraversion Continuum: Evolution and Human Behaviour. Evolution and Human Behavior 26: 363-373. Nyborg, H. 1994. Hormones, Sex, and Society: The Science of Physiology. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. Ogunbiyi, J. & Shittu, O. 1999. Increased Incidence of Prostate Cancer in Nigerians. Journal of the National Medical Association 3:159-164 Osegbe, D. N. 1997. Prostate Cancer in Nigerians: Facts and Non-Facts. Journal of Urology 157:1340-1343. Powell, I. J. 2007. Epidemiology and Pathophysiology of Prostate Cancer in African-American Men. Journal of Urology 177:444–449. Rohrmann, S., Nelson, W.G., Rifai, N., Brown, T. R., Dobs, A., Kanarek, N., Yager, J. D., Platz, E. A. 2007. Serum Estrogen, But Not Testosterone Levels Differ Between Black and White Men in a Nationally Representative Sample of Americans. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 92:2519-2525 Ross, R. K., L. Bernstein, R. A. Lobo, H. Shimizu, F. Z. Stanczyk, M. C. Pike, and B. E. Henderson. 1992. 5-Apha-Reductase Activity and Risk of Prostate Cancer among Japanese and US White and Black Males. Lancet 339:887-889. Ross, R., L. Bernstein, H. Judd, R. Hanisch, M. Pike, and B. Henderson. 1986. Serum Testosterone Levels in Healthy Young Black and White Men. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 76:45-48. Tsai, C. J., B.A. Cohn, P. M. Cirillo, D. Feldman, F. Z. Stanczyk, A. S. Whittemore. 2006. Sex Steroid Hormones in Young Manhood and the Risk of Subsequent Prostate Cancer: A Longitudinal Study in African-Americans and Caucasians (United States). Cancer Causes Control 17:1237-1244. Winters, S. J., A. Brufsky, J. Weissfeld, D. L. Trump, M. A. Dyky, and V. Hadeed. 2001. Testosterone, Sex Hormone-Binding Globulin, and Body Composition in Young Adult African American and Caucasian Men. Metabolism 50:1242-1247. This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support more of this valuable research.
Repost from the old site. Updated April 2, 2012. The peopling of the Philippines is a bit better understood than the peopling of Indonesia described in my another post. At least we know that most of the Philippines was first settled long ago by Negritos.
An Aeta Negrito woman of the Philippines. The Aeta live mostly in Northern Luzon. White Nationalists and Afrocentrists both insist that these folks are Black people, but they are very distant from African Blacks. White people are much closer to Blacks than these Negritos. Genetically, these people resemble the Filipinos they live with.Their skulls resemble other Australoid types such as Papuans and Aborigines. Genetically, they are classed as Asians. They are part of the Southeast Asian Major Race. Their minor race is known as the Philippines Negrito Race. It includes the Ati, Aeta and, strangely, the Palau of Micronesia. There is also another Negrito race in the Philippines – the Mamanwa Philippines Negrito Race. The woman and child above are both Mamanwas. The woman has the typical woolly hair, but the baby has the wavy, Veddoid-like hair seen in many Mamanwas. The Mamanwa are a group of Philippine Negritos from northeastern Mindanao that are very different from all of the rest of the Negritos in the area. They live in Surigao del Sur in northeastern Mindanao, especially near Mount Hilong-Hilong. They are thought to be the last remains of the original Negritos to move into the Philippines. There are considerable differences in stature and blood proteins between the Mamanwas and the other Negritos, and they may represent separate migrations. Excellent photos of modern-day Mamanwas, a group of only 5,000 or so people, can be seen here. I cannot help but notice the resemblance to the Veddoid people of India and Sri Lanka and the Senoi of Malaysia. A few have woolly Negrito hair, but look at how many have the wavy Veddoid hair. The Mamanwa language seems to be in good shape, judging by the figure that only
Here is a linguistics text on Mamanwa. This called a “text”, in this case a “text” of Mamanwa. It means it is a snippet of Mamanwa, with English translation usually written interlineally so we can see not only what the text means, but what the parts of each word mean too, as even the words are divided into morphemes and translated as best they can be. The text in most primitive groups usually has to do with myths, legends or stories of the ethnic group, rather than stories about day to day behavior. In this case, it is interesting that the Mamanwa, the oldest Negritos on the Philippines, have a story about the time of their ancestors, when the Mamanwa were “like children”. I guess this means that the early Mamanwa had not reached a very high level of civilization. Sometimes these stories seem silly or boring to me, but usually they have a lot of meaning for the group who tells them.
Unlike many other places where the Negritos seem to have died out or transcended to other forms, in the Philippines they still exist in a relatively pristine form, even if they are going extinct, culturally, linguistically and probably racially. Although some give the Negrito population at as low as 32,000, I say that there are 119,606 Negritos left in the Philippines, most of whom are still speaking Negrito languages, based on my estimate from here. The total Negrito population, including those who have given up on their native languages, is not known. They are found throughout the archipelago in various types. They long ago lost their original languages and now speak Austronesian languages related to the Austronesian settlers who began arriving 5,000 years ago. Philippine Negritos have bred in heavily with standard-issue Filipinos such that the Negritos are now closer to Filipinos than to any other group.
A Dumagat Negrito woman from northern Luzon with her family. The hair at first looks like the Afro a kinky-haired African can grow, but it is actually woolly and not kinky. Dumagat is a generic name for speakers of many Negrito languages in northern Luzon.
On the other hand, Filipinos do not seem to have much Negrito in them. Genetically, we can see only tiny traces of the original Negritos in the Filipino genome. Similar traces can be seen in Micronesians and probably in Malays and Indonesians. These traces range from .02 to .1
Anthropologically, Filipino skulls look SE Asian. Nor do Filipinos look Negrito. In appearance they resemble other Austronesians like Taiwanese aborigines, Indonesians and Malays. While Philippines Negrito genes look Filipino, Negrito skulls look Australoid, clustering with Aborigines, the Ainu, Tamils, Aborigines, the Sakai of Malaysia, Papuans, Melanesians and Fuegian and Pericu Amerindians. The Negritos have long been a small group in the Philippines, and the other Filipinos have long dwarfed them in population. Hence, a small amount of inbreeding quickly produced many Filipino genes in Negritos but few Negrito genes in Filipinos.
A Manobo, possibly an Agusan Manobo, man in traditional dress. Most Manobos today wear Western clothing. Some, like the ones who live near the Mamanwa in Surigao del Sur in northeast Mindanao, live off the forest and are being badly affected by deforestation. The Agusan Manobo have at least
Traditionally, the Manobos are considered to be among the Nesiot Austronesians. 5
A very difficult linguistics paper on Agusan Manobo is available here. It deals with a subfield called discourse analysis, something I never studied and hence don’t really understand very well. It analyzes language at the discourse level – beyond sounds (phonology), parts of words (morphology), words (lexicology), and sentences (syntax). It analyzes narratives and tries to locate patterns and truths about the way that humans use language to make narratives and tell stories. Believe it or not, the rules and patterns of language work at the narrative level too. The Agusan Manobo allowed husbands to have multiple wives, common in many primitive cultures. This was usually relegated to those men who had the most money. In this tribe, only women can be religious leaders, which is interesting and resembles the Kalash of Pakistan. The Druze of Lebanon and Israel also have many female religious leaders. I think this is a great idea as I have been worshiping females all my life.
Some Filipino populations, such as the Manobos, described above, that have a somewhat higher level of Negrito genes, but even that level is very small, around
A cute Dumagat Negrito girl trying to read a book. Looking at her hair and features, she is clearly heavily mixed in with Filipino.
Most Filipinos have few if any Negrito genes. There are some Filipinos with Negrito ancestry, and this is readily observable in their woolly or kinky hair and very dark complexion.
A full-grown Ati woman. The Ati live on Panay Island, where they number about 1,500. Their language is still alive. I actually think she is attractive. She’s definitely cute in a child-like way anyway. Note the classical woolly hair of the Philippine Negritos. This is not the same hair as the kinky hair of US Blacks. Other Negritos in the Andaman Islands have peppercorn hair like the Bushmen of Africa.
There are many photos in the older literature of Filipino-Negrito half-breeds, and there is probably still some interbreeding going on. There is a lot of discrimination against Negritos in the Philippines.
A photo of a Negrito man, an Ati from Negros Island, from an anthropological text published around 1916. This text had many photos of mixed Negrito-Filipino types. The Ati of Negros have apparently gone extinct.
On Luzon there is a regular festival in honor of the local Negritos. Almost everyone at the festival is a non-Negrito. A few Negritos wander around the crowd begging and are treated with contempt and ridicule by their non-Negrito brethren.
In a sign that the Negritos may be getting treated better in the Philippines, Juliet Chavez, a Dumagat Negrito, recently won a beauty contest. She is not bad looking.
One of my Filipino contacts told me that the best description of the Filipino attitude towards Negritos is that they do not even exist. The Philippine Negritos are related to the first groups out of Africa 60-70,000 years ago. They left via the Horn of Africa, got on boats and crossed over to Yemen, then went on boats or walked along the shore along the Indian Ocean to Iran, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, New Guinea, Indonesia and Australia.
The journey taken by early man out of Africa 70,000 years ago. It makes the most sense to think that people migrated along the coast, especially in desert regions. Today in Oman, almost all towns are located along the coast. There were widespread mangrove forests all along this route back then, though most of them have since died out. There’s plenty to eat along the coast, and the weather is much milder. A journey inland through deserts by such primitive people may have been deadly. Probably the first people undertaking this epic voyage, to which we are all indebted, were the Negritos.
It is generally accepted that Negritos or pre-Negritos probably arrived in the Philippines 30,000 years ago. Findings in caves on Palawan include a 22,500 year old skull called Tabon Man. The skull most resembles modern-day Ainu and Tasmanian people – hence, the Tabon Man people were an Australoid or Aborigine-type people. They were not Negritos. However, there is also a fragment of a human tibia bone dated 47,000 years ago, so Negritos or pre-Negritos must have been present in the Philippines nearly 50,000 years ago. These caves show habitation going back, some say, 50,000 years. Finds at the Tabon Caves are interesting in that giant tortoises and even elephants are found there, animals that have since died out on the Philippines. At other sites, boars, deer, giant and pygmy elephants and rhinoceros have been found. Presently, large mammals are rare to lacking on the archipelago, a common characteristic of islands. Some archaeologists believe that an even earlier man was present on the Philippines up to 250,000 years ago. This “Dawn Man” is thought to be related to Peking Man and Java Man, that is, he is a variety of Homo Erectus. No bones of this man have been found, but that has not prevented archaeologists from strangely speculating about his appearance. Dr. Otley Beyer, an American anthropologist, is the one who postulated the existence of Dawn Man. But findings at Tabon Cave date back at most 50,000 years, not 250,000 years. Nevertheless, there are what some say are human artifacts in the Cagayan Valley on Luzon dating back 500,000 years, so Otley may have been onto something. Other reports indicate these tools date back 800,000 years, in the range of Java Man. Others investigating similar sites in the Philippines question whether or not these are really tools, but even these people describe their own clear human artefactual finds as Acheulean and Lower Paleolithic. These inhabitants must have been Homo Erectus, and were probably related to Java Man and possibly to Peking Man. Acheulean dates from 100,000 to 1.8 million years ago, and Lower Paleolithic spans from 120,000 to 2.5 million years ago. Clearly, the use of these terms by these Cagayan doubters means that even they feel that Homo was in the Philippines at least 120,000 years ago. Palawan is at the very far end of the Philippines near Indonesia. Indonesia has been inhabited by Homo derivatives for 2 million years. The theory is that Palawan was at one time connected to Borneo, and early man came to the Philippines via this land bridge.
A Batak Negrito woman of Palawan Island, possibly related to some of the first Negritos to show up in the Philippines. The Palawan Batak number 2,041, and about 1/2 the population speak the language. Note the woolly hair. Parts of Palawan near Tabon Cave are still pretty sparsely populated. Although Tabon Cave is now right on the seashore, it used to be 25-30 miles inland. Only 1
All artifacts and bones have to be shipped out of the Philippines to more developed countries to be analyzed and then shipped back, since the Philippines, with its semi-feudal capitalist model, lacks the modern facilities to analyze artifacts. This is the one great thing Mao did for China – he built a modern country. Mao’s achievement is best seen in comparisons like this one. This blog supports the NPA in the Philippines.
The caves of Tabon show evidence of jar burial connected with the Plain of Jars in Laos and other sites in Sri Lanka. This is probably a Negrito culture in Sri Lanka and Laos. The Negritos probably came to the Philippines from Malaysia, where they existed 50,000 years ago, down the Malay Peninsula, over to Borneo and up to Palawan in the Philippines, then to the rest of the islands. A map of land bridges in the area 50,000 years ago is here. Today, the Negritos are known as Ati, Aeta, Agta, Arta, Atta, Alta and Ita, among other names. The word appears to be not their own name for themselves but an appellation placed on them by the surrounding Filipinos. In Austronesian languages, a word like ita often means “black”.
Aeta kids in the Philippines. Some of them look almost like Aborigines. The girl on the far right has a lot of Filipino blood based on her hair and features. The cute girl on the second to left is very heavily admixed with Filipino blood.
They practiced a Stone Age culture up until modern times.
A Pugot Negrito hunter of Southern Luzon with a small deer he has killed, in a photo from a travel guide in 1987. Note that he is clad only in a loincloth. They live around Quezon Province south of Manila and speak a language called Southern Alta, which has about 1,000 speakers.
Today, their lands have been invaded and stolen by non-Negrito Filipinos, and the Negritos labor as peasants on the lands of the Filipinos. Many are unemployed, and cultural collapse is evident. Marriages are unstable, domestic abuse is common, drunkenness is omnipresent, and watching pornography is a pastime. The languages are in a state of Language Death. In the past few decades, there have been quite a few murders of Negritos by Filipino settlers. There have been few, if any, prosecutions for these crimes.
The Tiruray of Cotabato in Southern Mindanao . They are also known as the Ata and the Upland Bagobo. They may be related to Negritos, but they are clearly quite mixed. Traditionally, they are considered to be part of the second wave of Nesiot Austronesians from Taiwan. They are quite dark. Being short and dark is an advantage in very hot climates. Dark skin avoids skin damage from UV waves and prevents the destruction of folic acid in the woman’s body during pregnancy, lack of which kills a high percentage of fetuses. Being short enables one to dissipate heat more quickly in a very hot climate. A large body quickly overheats in such a climate.The
Tiruray language is in excellent shape. All 50,000 Tiruray speak it, and the literacy rate in Tiruray is 4
After the Negritos, two more possibly Australoid groups came to the Philippines, both poorly understood. Traditional Philippine anthropology says that the Australoid-Sakais came first, and then the proto-Malay. It’s possible that it may have been the other way around, if their arrival in the Philippines mirrored their arrival in Australia. My working of events reverses the traditional model and postulates that the proto-Malay appeared first, and then the Australoid-Sakais. The proto-Malay were short and very hairy – were they related to the Ainu? It is not known if they were Australoid or not. The nature of the proto-Malay is completely unclear. A very hairy and early Asian seems to imply someone related to the Ainu. The proto-Ainu were in Thailand 18,000 years ago as the Jomon, when they got on boats and moved up to Japan. In Malaysia, the proto-Malay are the product of Austronesians from Taiwan breeding in with Veddoid Senoi. It is not known if the proto-Malay described in the peopling of the Philippines are the same people as those in Malaysia, but these people do not seem to be hairy at all. It seems more logical that the proto-Malay described here may have been the same Murrayan Jomonese-Ainu who came to Australia 15,000-20,000 years ago, possibly from Thailand, later mixed with the Carpinterians, and went on to become the Aborigines. As the Philippines is on the way from Thailand to Australia, it’s conceivable they could have moved into the Philippines along the way. Australoid-Sakais were the next group to come to Philippines after the proto-Malay. The Sakais are the same as the Senoi in Malaysia. The Senoi are the subject of the most flagrant yet little known anthropological frauds of our time – the Senoi Dream Theory fraud. A discussion goes beyond the scope of this post, but this exhaustive site fills in all the blanks. They seem to be a part-Veddoid group with links to the Veddoids of India and Sri Lanka. They also seem to have some roots in Southern China 5,000 years ago. It appears that whatever movements brought them to Malaysia may have carried them over to the Philippines. The Sakai mixed in heavily with the Negritos. It is quite possible that this is the same group as the Carpinterian Australoids who left India 10,000-15,000 years ago and went to Australia to mingle with the Murrayan Australoids and become the Aborigines. As the Philippines is on the way from southern India to Australia, it’s conceivable they could have stopped by the Philippines along the way. All of these early Australoid groups – the Sakai, the proto-Malay and the Negritos – seem to have left little trace on the Filipinos of today. The next group to come to the Philippines were the
A Tboli tribal from South Cotabato Province in Southwest Mindanao. These people are said to be proto-Malays who arrived even before the Austronesians who came to the Philippines 5,000 years ago. No one really knows where these proto-Malays came from. Some say they came from Indonesia, but that seems dubious. Perhaps genetics can sort all this out. The Tboli language is in excellent shape, with 95,000 speakers, and there are 10,000 Tboli monolinguals. Tboli is spoken freely and everywhere by the group. Their literacy rate in Tboli is 50-6
This document, Figurative Uses of ‘Breath’ in Tboli, is a linguistics text dealing with the field of Semantics, or the meaning of words. It’s easily readable by any reasonably educated reader of this blog, and you might find it interesting to dip into it. In Tboli, one may combine the noun “breath” with 53 different adjectives and verbs to create different expressions of emotions, characteristics, or new verbs. Lengun nawa – “coffin breath” – worry, anxiety – is a cool example. More at the link.
The first wave of Nesiots came 5,000 years ago. They were tall and thin, and had light skin, deep set eyes, aquiline noses and thin lips. It is common to say that these people were part-Caucasian, but there is little evidence of this. Some of the Mangyan of Mindoro today do look somewhat Caucasian.
An Igorot of Luzon. They have a distinctive appearance that most Filipinos can recognize. These are among the last groups of Austronesians out of Taiwan. These people are also known as Bontoc, and speak two different languages, Central Bontoc and Northern Kankanay. Together these groups number 110,000. Note the terraced rice fields. Rice cultivation was brought to the Philippines by the Austronesians when they first arrived maybe 5,000 years ago from Taiwan. Some Bontoks look quite Negrito – the woman in this photo obviously has Negrito blood. An Alangan Mangyan woman from north-central Mindoro.The language has 7,694 speakers and is in good shape. Some say these people may be related to Negritos, but that is not proven. I have a friend on Mindoro who says she likes the Mangyan but prefers not to deal with them when they come into Calapan City where she stays sometimes. Asked why not, she said it is because they smell bad. They live pretty primitive lives via slash and burn agriculture in the jungles of Mindoro, but maybe they don’t bathe all that much. They come into the cities now and then to buy stuff. The men, even today, are often clad only in a loincloth.
A second wave came later. They were shorter, bulkier and darker, with thick lips, wide noses and heavy jaws. As these groups are also related to the Sea Dayak of Borneo and the Batak of Sumatra anthropologically, and the Paiwan Taiwanese aborigines genetically, it seems strange to say that they came from Indonesia. They were probably ancestors of the Paiwan who came to Indonesia and the Philippines by boats. Ancestors of the Batak later went on to populate Polynesia and from there Micronesia. I call the group made up of Sea Dayak, Sumatrans, Balinese and the Paiwan the Island SE Asian Race. From 700-2,300 yrs ago, the last wave of Austronesians came from Taiwan, and these are the present day Pinoys. This group, traditionally called Malays, is almost exclusively related to the Ami aborigine tribe of Taiwan. An initial group of these Ami came 1,900-2,300 years ago and formed the primitive, headhunting groups in the Luzon hill tribes. These tribes include the Igorots, Ifugaos , Bontoks and the Tinggians or Tinguians. Another group of Ami came from 700-1,900 years ago, and includes the Visayans, Tagalogs, Ilocanos, Bicolanos and Kapampangans. This group was much more advanced than the earlier group, and actually used an alphabet. The overwhelming majority of Filipinos today are related to this last group. 900 years ago, a large wave of southern Chinese came to the Philippines on boats and totally mixed in with the Ami-Filipinos.
Beautiful little Filipina girls. This is a classic Filipino phenotype.
Present-day Filipinos are mostly related to the Ami of Taiwan who came 700- 2,300 years ago, with heavy Southern Chinese admixture from the Chinese who came 900 years ago. The ancient Southern Chinese portion has totally mixed in to the point where we cannot see it genetically anymore, but it is there and can be seen by plotting Filipinos with Southern Chinese and noting that they plot quite close together. More recently, there has also been some mixing with Chinese, but most Filipinos do not show evidence of this recent mixing. About 2
Tales that the Filipinos are part-Australoid or heavily mixed with Negrito, very common beliefs among racists, racialists and amateur anthropologists on the Internet, are all in error, at least based on genetics or skull measures. The notion that Filipinos are part-Australoid is based on looking at their faces and noting that their faces appear somewhat Australoid. This older anthropological method of dividing up groups into racial types a la Carleton Coon has fallen completely out of favor in recent years.
An old photo of Tagalogs on Luzon from the early part of the 20th Century. Some Filipinos are quite dark. Even these people are probably mostly Chinese people from Taiwan.
The Filipinos are first and foremost a Southern Chinese people, genetically related to the far Southern Han Chinese from around Hong Kong and the aboriginal Taiwanese tribe, the Ami.
A cute Ami girl from the Ami tribe of Taiwanese aborigines. Modern-day Filipinos, excepting some tribals, are extremely close genetically to the Ami of Taiwan, such that one can easily posit a Filipino-Ami subgroup. The most parsimonious conclusion is that most Filipinos today are derived from a large group of Ami who traveled via boat from Taiwan to the Philippines from 700-2,300 years.
There has since been a large infusion of Chinese to the Philippines. Many Filipinos in and around Manila claim recent Chinese ancestry. The Ami and other Taiwanese tribes were headhunters even as recently as the 1930’s. During the Japanese occupation, they were a perennial headache to the occupiers.
They had a tendency to behead the local Hokko Chinese (the mainland Chinese who came to Taiwan starting in the 1600’s). In one incident related in Time Magazine from the 1930’s, 100 Taiwanese aborigine women committed suicide en masse as their village was attacked by Japanese colonists, screaming that if their men warriors were killed defending the village, they would die too.
Map of Taiwanese aborigines showing the location of the Ami on the east coast of the island. The Ami were perfectly positioned to colonize much of island SE Asia.
Recent research shows some intriguing suggestions of closer link between Ami and the rest of the extra-Taiwanese Austronesian languages than between extra-Taiwanese Austronesian and the non-Ami Taiwanese languages. Austronesian is a vast family, but all of the main branches but one are on the island of Taiwan.
All extra-Taiwanese Austronesian languages form one vast family. There are cognates between such unexpected languages as Tagalog and Hawaiian, showing that the two peoples are related. The very deep diversity in Taiwanese Austronesian indicates that the Taiwanese languages have been evolving on the island for a very long time.
In fact, I was able to construct a compact race called that I called the South China Sea Race, composed of Filipinos, the Ami of Taiwan and the Guangdong Han, a shorthand for the Southern Chinese of Guangdong Province, Hong Kong and the Taiwan Strait.
The ancient proto-Ami descendants of the Filipinos were the speakers of Austronesian ancestor language of all the Philippines, the Sama-Bajau languages and Gorontalo-Mongondow languages. They also founded the Zabag Empire and it’s successor Lusung Empire, ancient small kingdoms in the Philippines. There were ancient Yue Kingdoms in Guangdong that were originally founded by the Ami of Taiwan. There have been complaints in the comments section at the end of the post that Filipinos and Hong Kong Chinese do not look much alike. I do not know Asians very well, and to me Southern Chinese from around Hong Kong have darker skins and more SE Asian features than any other Chinese that I have encountered. Apparently, Hong Kong Chinese and Filipinos can be readily discerned by those in the know. However, some say that when they are in Hong Kong, they have a hard time telling the Filipinos from the Hong Kong natives. They says the only way they can tell them apart is by talking to them. But my racial classification is not based on phenotype – it is based on genes and genes alone. Check the Capelli and Chu papers linked at the end of the piece for evidence linking first the Filipinos to the Ami, and then the Hong Kong Chinese to the Ami. The Chinese in this area have some of the world’s highest recorded IQ’s of around ~105. Oddly, the Filipino IQ is only 86, but there is a tremendous amount of malnutrition in the Philippines, and the population is poorly educated as the semi-feudal state spends almost nothing on schooling the people. Filipinos I have known of no more than average intelligence show typical Asian traits of behavioral inhibition, calmness, shyness, self-consciousness and even a degree of introversion in the females along typical Asian time preference and providence (willingness to work hard today in the interest of possible rewards at some unknown future time). Improvidence is typically associated with lower IQ’s, while increased providence is associated with higher IQ’s, so it is interesting to see that the Filipinos, with a relatively low IQ of 86, have behavioral attributes of higher-IQ groups. I have been completely stunned by the highly developed math skills of Filipinos who have only at best average intelligence. Asian intelligence is highly weighted towards math and visual intelligence. All of these things add weight to the notion of Filipinos being a Southern Chinese people. India, with a national IQ of only 81, has developed an amazing high tech and call center economy. Call centers are moving to the Philippines, where, if anything, English skills are better than in India. I think that the Philippines shows good potential for IT, based on better than expected math skills. Lack of behavioral disinhibition and good time preference ought to be good traits in the Filipino labor force. Like many people who evolved in the tropics, Filipinos are sunny, happy and seemingly carefree. They love to laugh, sing and party. In this way they resemble Thais, Cambodians, Laos, Malays, Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Indonesians, Caribbeans and even Africans.
Typical Filipinos of today. Note the easy smiles and carefree faces. Poster is from a government contraception campaign, badly needed in this overpopulated land.
The Philippines may have a better future in the modern economy than many think. This blog does support the armed Maoist insurgency waged by the New People’s Army in the Philippines, but that is really the subject of another post.
References
- Bulbeck, D., Rainer, D. Groves, C., Raghavan, P. 2003. “The Contribution of South Asia to the Peopling of Australasia” and the Relevance of Basel’s Naturhistorisch Museum to the Anthropological Collection to the Project Aims. Bull. Soc. Suisse d’Anthrop. 9(2):49-70. Capelli, C., Wilson, J.F., Richards, M., Stumpf, M.P.H., Gratrix, F., Oppenheimer, S., Underhill, P., Pascali, V.L., Ko, T.M., and Goldstein, D.B. 2001. A Predominantly Indigenous Paternal Heritage for the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania. American Journal of Human Genetics 68:432-443. Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., P. Menozzi, A. Piazza. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chu, J. Y., Huang, W., Kuang, S. Q., Wang, J. M., Xu, J. J., Chu, Z. T., Yang, Z. Q., Lin, K. Q., Li, P., Wu, M., Geng, Z. C., Tan, C. C., Du, R. F., and Jin, L.. 1998. Genetic Relationship of Populations in China. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) 95:11763-11768. Gaillard, Jean-Christophe and Mallari, Joel P. 2004. The Peopling of the Philippines: A Cartographic Synthesis. Hukay: Journal of the University of the Philippines Archaeological Studies Program. 6:1-27. Harihara, S., Saitou, N., Hirai, M., Gojobori, T., Park, K. S., Misawa, S., Ellepola, S. B., Ishida, T. and Omoto, K. 1988. Mitochondrial DNA Polymorphism Among Five Asian Populations. American Journal of Human Genetics 43:134-143. Headland, Thomas N. 2003. Thirty Endangered Languages in the Philippines. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session 47. Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. 2000. The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution. Miller, Jeanne and Helen W. Miller. 1978. Mamanwa [language texts]. In Evan L. Antworth (ed.), Folktale Texts, 80-90. Studies in Philippine Linguistics, 2(2). Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines and Summer Institute of Linguistics. Omoto, K. 1984. The Negritos: Genetic Origins and Microevolution. Acta Anthropogenetics 8(1-2):137-47. Omoto, K., Ueda, S., Goriki, K., Takahashi, N., Misawa, S., and Pagaran, I. G. 1981. Population Genetic Studies of the Philippine Negritos. III. Identification of the Carbonic Anhydrase-1 Variant With CA1 Guam. American Journal of Human Genetics 33(1):105-111. Porter, Doris. 1977. Figurative Uses of ‘Breath’ in Tboli. Studies in Philippine Linguistics 1(1):148-50. Schumacher, Ronald L. 1986. Stative Verbs at Peak in Agusan Manobo Narrative Discourse. Studies in Philippine Linguistics 6(1):80-93.
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