Alt Left: A Bit on the Vietnam War from a Boy Who Had a Front-row Seat

In 1972, we were in the fourth year of Nixon’s stupid “Vietnamization” slow withdrawal, otherwise known as “peace with honor.” This idiot’s peace with honor crap got another 20,000 and God knows how many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead. So Americans could have honor. 500,000 human beings dead so Americans could feel honorable. You know what? Fuck that. I was a sophomore in high school at the time.

I remember my father hated Nixon and Vietnamization. The Paris Peace Talks were going on all this time too. (((Henry Kissinger))) (The Evil One) was representing the US, so of course almost nothing got done. Nixon was bombing North Vietnam all this time. The Vietnamese had good anti-aircraft weapons (often manned by women!) and they shot down quite a few of our planes.

In addition, they had a lot of Russian MIG fighter jets. I’m not sure if it was Russians or Viets flying them, but they were very good. They were move than a match for our F-15’s and F-16’s, which were very good jets by the way. A lot of our jets got shot down in dogfights with MIGs. I believe he mined the harbor at Haiphong too. The schmuck even invaded Cambodia. I remember that. My father was livid.

This was also the time of My Lai. And the POW’s making broadcasts in North Vietnamese prisons.

Of course, over South Vietnam, we ruled the skies and our jets were never shot down. But we also used helicopters for air cover, and those things did get shot down a lot by Vietnamese troops on the ground. There was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, not really a road but endless paths cut through the thickest jungle on Earth. We flew planes over that trail all the time bombing it, but we never could shut it down, and the Viets still moved an incredible amount of men and equipment through that trail. The vehicles were often camouflaged with leaves.

Keep in mind that the Viet Cong (the South Vietnamese Communists) were basically wiped out by the Tet Offensive. After Tet, the North Vietnamese took over the war and they were a much more formidable opponent – a real army – than the Viet Cong, who were also very good but specialized in guerrilla war.

We were also bombing the Hell out of Laos at the time. Most of the bombing was focused on the Plain of Jars in the north. A number of our jets got shot down over Laos too. I’m not sure how they did it. POW’s were not just in North Vietnam. The Pathet Lao (the Laotian Communists) held quite a few US POW’s too. Neither they nor the North Vietnamese treated the POW’s well, but the Pathet Lao were probably worse. One small group of POW’s managed to escape a Pathet Lao prison camp. It is quite an impressive story.

In Laos, we recruited the Hmong, primitive tribesmen who didn’t understand the meaning of the words communism or capitalism and couldn’t have cared less even if we did. We paid these suckers and bribed them to be our mercenaries.

The CIA also smuggled a vast amount of opium out of this area called the Golden Triangle via the Nugen Hand Operation.

In 1968, I walked precints with my father for the antiwar candidate, Gene (Clean Gene) McCarthy. I was 10 years old. I think my father supported the war but he turned after the Tet Offensive. That’s when US support for the war dipped below 5

Westmoreland kept telling us that we were winning all the time, getting closer and closer to total defeat of the enemy. The phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” was used many times. Then Tet hit. The Viet Cong attacked every significant city and US military base in South Vietnam simultaneously. They infiltrated Saigon where there were guerrilla battles everywhere. They invaded the US embassy and almost took it over. The Marine guards shot the invaders, who lay on the front lawn, but some of the attaches had to retreat up to higher floors to be rescued.

This was the enemy, that was on its last legs, nearly defeated. Yeah right. Tet showed this for the massive lie it was. Light at the end of the tunnel my ass. Slowly getting better my ass. People had had enough. There was already an antiwar movement, but it really took off after Tet.

Back then we had an actual free independent First Amendment style media, unlike the stenographers, hacks, and state controlled media we have now. Journalists would actually get on TV and criticize a US war! It was during Tet that the great Walter Cronkite (yes, I saw him on TV many times) said the war was hopeless and he was withdrawing support for it. Can you imagine any US TV presstitute saying that about any US war nowadays? Hell no! A free press was a beautiful thing. Too bad we haven’t had one for a very long time in this country, a good 30 years, maybe more.

Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Southern and Northern Chinese: How to Tell Them Apart

How the Hell would I know? They’re all just a bunch of gooks to me! J/k. Don’t report me to SJW  Central Control please!

SHI: One should just go with a Vietnamese or Northern Chinese girl if you’re craving a Korean. Can’t tell the difference anyway.

SHI is a connoisseur of women, and I am more like a common sewer when it comes to women, but I will respect his judgement nevertheless.

Northern Chinese look very much like Koreans, and I very much doubt if there is a good way to sort them out. Koreans do have very prominent high cheekbones. That’s their Mongolian heritage as they pretty much came from Mongolia long ago. They along with the Japanese settled on the northeast coast of China in the Shandong area 7-8,000 years ago (believe it or not) and stayed there for many years. See recent excellent work by Martine Robeets on this.

The Koreans may have moved in from there 3-5,000 YBP, and Japanese invaded Japan in a huge wave 2,300 YBP. These people were called the Yayoi. The Yayoi are actually thought to have moved first from Shandong to Korea and then south from Korea to Japan a couple thousand years ago. But Northern Chinese and Mongolians are more or less the same thing.

The Japanese came from this same Mongolian stock, but they bred in so deeply with the Ainu that they definitely look different from Koreans. But they both also look quite similar, and it’s not easy to tell them apart either. In addition, there are a lot of mixed Japanese-Koreans in Japan. They’re almost a cliche.

Viets definitely look different from either Japanese or Koreans. They are also full of Chinese, but they are full of Cantonese Southern Chinese (“the barbarians” as the Northern Chinese refer to them), and Southern Chinese look a lot different from Northern Chinese.

Viets are a mixture of a more Austroloid type exemplified by the Montagnard tribesmen (look at a photo of them sometime). Actually the Montagnards are more like Australoids transitioning to Mongoloids or early SE Asians. Completed modern SE Asians are Mongoloids with some lingering traces of their Australoid heritage.

2,300 years ago, a huge wave of Southern Chinese conquerors spread through Vietnam and thoroughly bred in with the population. Nevertheless there was a Chinese minority in Vietnam in recent who tended to run the businesses (as usual). They were quite persecuted after the Communists took over, and most of them fled as boat people.

Diagnosis for the Philippines: Toxic America Worship

Jason writes:

Jason Y: New Filipino president hates America and is even meaner than Hugo Chavez.

Glad to hear it.

Jason: The people there though, in general, still like America.

Too bad. They really need to quit doing this. Filipinos’ love for America is probably screwing them up more than anything else because as usual, America loves the fact that the Philippines is a shithole and wants to keep it that way as long as possible. By worshipping America, Filipinos are essentially cheering for the fact that they live in a shithole and saying they never want to climb out. Further, America would get very angry if the Philippines ever started to get their act together, which they have probably never done at any time in their history, though give them some credit in the War of Independence and World War 2. Jose Rizal was a great man. Where is the Filipino Jose Rizal in 2016? He doesn’t exist. Pathetic. Few Filipinos these days have anywhere near his majestic decency. They are too wrapped up in the moronic self-harming culture of America worship to even figure out why their country is so messed up. And Filipinos are worse than Americans at voting against their self-interest. Worse, Filipinos are even incapable of understanding what their self-interests even are (sound like Americans?) while Americans are sort of starting to get a clue to the disease they have, though we are choosing the wrong cure as usual. But if you want to get better, have have to first get a good diagnosis. But Filipinos will never get anywhere until they start hating us like we deserve to be hated. That’s Step #1.

What Race Is This Person (Singapore)?

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An interesting phenotype from Singapore.
This is the aunt of a friend of mine. The family is from Singapore. They are part of an ethnic group called the Pernakans, a Southern Chinese group that moved to Malaysia ~600 years ago for some reason, possibly due to overcrowding in Fujian or worse, the terrible wars that periodically raged through the region. Chinese groups have been leaving from this part of Southern China for a very long time now, especially in the last 200 years. In the past couple of centuries, this part of China has become very crowded. Possibly as a result, wild and vicious wars periodically raged through the area, sometimes killing 100,000’s of people. If you study Chinese history, you will hear about these wars a lot. It is not uncommon to read that invaders conquered several large cities and exterminated the whole populations of perhaps 300,000 people, men, women and children. This is how the Chinese have often fought wars. Chinese wars are unbelievably vicious and savage. The Pernakans moved to Malaysia, and over time, bred in with Dutch and Portuguese and to a lesser extent British Europeans. All three were colonists in the region. I believe that they were Min speakers, but their Hokkien has gotten so changed, in particular from massive borrowings from Malay, that these languages in general are no longer intelligible with Amoy or Taiwanese Hokkien Proper. Most Pernakans now are somewhat Eurasian, Chinese crossed with Dutch, Portuguese and sometimes British. The Pernakans had their own patriarchal culture and were known as very hard workers, often at manual labor type jobs like farming, timber harvest are working on rubber plantations. They committed little crime and had very orderly societies. The European colonists marveled at their high level of civilization. They did keep slaves, but they probably treated their slaves better than any slaves have ever been treated, and in many cases, slaves were freed. Over time, most Pernakans also bred in with Malays. Pernakans are now a Chinese/Malay/European race, but the Asiatic tends to be prominent over the European in the stock. The mixing of cultures over 600 years in Malaysia resulted in some very interesting fine cuisine. Many of these Chinese migrated to Singapore, where they, along with Teochew speakers (another Min group) and a large group of Cantonese Chinese, form what is known as the Singaporean Chinese, one of the wealthiest and most economically advanced ethnic groups on Earth. There is still a division of labor in Singapore, with Chinese on top, Malays on the bottom, and Southern Indian Dravidian speakers in between. Nevertheless all three groups are substantially mixed by this point. Most Chinese have Malay blood, and a lot of Malays have some Chinese in them. Malays and Indians are now intermarrying quite a bit. There is some ethnic conflict but not a lot possibly due to the wealth and everyone being so mixed. Although this woman has a somewhat archaic phenotype (note prognathism), these archaic types are fairly common in Southern China. Many can be seen in the mountains of Yunnan Province. The archaism may be due to incomplete transition from Australoid -> Mongoloid, as the transition happened much later in Southern China than in Northern China, and prominent Australoid types were common in the far south of China only 3-4,000 YBP. I also believe that this woman may be admixed with Caucasian. And I think the Malay admixture is quite clear. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think I see some Vedda influence here. That would not be unusual, as Malays were Veddoids only until quite recently, and the Senoi are Veddoids to this day. The Mani Negritos are also still extant. The transition in Malaysia went from Australoid Negritos (Mani) and Orang Asli -> Australoid Veddas (Senoi) -> Paleomongoloid Southeast Asians (modern Malays). The Malays appear to be aware of this transition, as they state that the Mani and Orang Asli are their ancestors. The bloodline of the Orang Asli goes back 72,000 YBP, so this group has been present in Malaysia since the very first Out of Africa groups, and their archaism is about on a par with the Andaman Islanders, another Australoid group which is also the remains of some of the earliest OOA groups.

The Vietnam War and the Land Question

Like the Iraqi police in the previous post, the South Vietnamese army similarly was poorly motivated and relied on the US Army to do their fighting for them. Apparently they felt little or no allegiance to the South Vietnamese state, for reasons of which we will discuss below. Although some ARVN soldiers fought well, many were lousy fighters who either would not advance on the enemy or would cut and run as soon as fighting broke out. They did not seem to have much loyalty to the South Vietnamese state.  And sure enough, soon after the US pulled out, ARVN was rapidly defeated by a highly motivated NVA from North Vietnam along with whatever was left of the Viet Cong after Tet in 1968 and the Phoenix Program after that. Supporters of the US war accuse North Vietnam of invading and interfering in the war, as if North and South Vietnam were valid states. Really there is just one country – Vietnam. The north was trying to reunify the country and had nationalism on its side. The South was corrupt, a regime of landlords and traitors who had previously worked for the French colonials and now worked for the US invaders who more or less colonized Vietnam after the French left. A lot of Left revolutions in the 3rd World have been driven more by the land question than anything else. A land reform is no big deal. You get paid for your land. But many states put it off forever and end up with a FARC, a Chavez, a Morales, an FMLN, Sandinistas, an NPA or a Viet Cong. There’s no putting off the land question. Until you deal with it, your nation will be in continuous turmoil.

Indonesian Soldiers Torture Papuan Men

The video in question is available on my video site. This is extremely shocking footage of Indonesian soldiers in West Papua torturing a Papuan man and his father. Indonesia stole West Papua from the Papuans in 1965, and has waged a genocidal and racist war against the Papuans ever since, a war that has killed 100,000 Papuans. Soldiers are extremely racist and view Papuans as little more than animals. Papuans try to fight back using very primitive weapons, but they are no match for the modern Indonesian military. US imperialism has backed the Indonesians to the hilt in this war because US corporations want to exploit various raw materials in Papua. The footage was filmed on a cellphone in May by one of the soldiers taking part in a military operation in the Punkak Jaya region of the Central Highlands of West Papua. The operation was launched against the Free Papua Movement, an armed group seeking freedom from Indonesian colonialism, but the troops are mostly just torturing, raping and murdering civilians like they always do. It is apparently “trophy footage.” This video is just a small part of a much larger video that shows the two men being tortured. In the bigger video, the older man is stripped naked, has a bag put over his head and has a burning stick applied to his genitals while he screams in agony. The young man has a knife held to his face. Details of who the victims are hard to come by since the area is a closed military zone, and journalists are banned from the area. However, the older man is missing and probably dead, while the young man has been released. Indonesian troops have been killing, torturing and raping Papuans with impunity since 1963. Victims have been as young as 3 years old. For many years, Indonesian troops have been taking trophy photos, now escalating to films, of Papuans being killed and raped. They show this media to Papuans in order to humiliate them. The footage appeared just recently, on October 20, 2010 and caused a bit of a media stir.

The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan

This is an interesting document outlining the prospects for revolution in Pakistan.

If not for Islam, Pakistan would probably already be in a revolutionary situation right now.

Bangladesh, where objective conditions are just as bad as in India, if not worse, has seen little progress in an actual armed struggle by Maoist forces, mostly due to the presence of Islam. Islamic Bangladesh has recently seen a large movement towards Islamism, though the nation’s elites are still secular. The Islamic parties are very large and popular.

Your average poor, starving peasant, who ought to be on board with revolution, is instead wasting his time jerking off with Islamist reactinaries. The Islamist militias have attacked the Maoists many times, killing many cadres. The state is probably using them for this purpose. This is reminiscent of the situtation in Indonesia in 1965, when Islamist militias were used to kill 1 million Communists in less than a year, a massacre that the CIA was involved in from start to finish.

Every time revolution rears its head in the Islamic World, the Islamists immediately condemn them as “atheists” and slaughter them. I assume that your average religious Muslim supports this massacre of the apostates.

Since Islam is so embedded in the population, I am dubious at the prospects for revolution in Pakistan. The Islamists will quickly condemn the Maoists as “atheists” and will be free to slaughter them. Further, the state will use the Islamist militias, as it already does. For instance, the Pakistani state used the Islamist militias to kill Benazir Bhutto recently. Further, getting pegged as atheists will make it hard for the Maoists to get support.

The revolutionary situation in Hindu countries is much better for some reason. Maoism went over great in Nepal, and the Maoists are doing well in India. In Nepal, the Maoists simply asked, “What’s Hinduism done for you lately?” The answer in general was nothing. Hinduism was used via the caste system by local elites to repress the peasants in a feudal to semi-feudal manner. In India, most of the Hindu Maoists have not really given up Hinduism. I suspect that Hinduism is not as deeply embedded in your average peasant’s psyche as Islam is.

Nevertheless, I understand that the PMKP is already quite popular among peasants oppressed by semi-feudalism. They hold large rallies in favor of land rights and lots of peasants show up. I assume that they don’t directly attack Islam – that would be idiotic in Pakistan. I have a Pakistani friend who comes from a feudal landlord family, and even she supported the PMKP, saying they were good for the peasants.

At any rate, I don’t think a revolutionary situation exists in Pakistan right now, and it will be a while before one starts up. And that’s almost all due to Islam.

The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan

August 12, 2010

A Statement to the Seventh National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party

From the General Secretary of Revolutionary Initiative

With our fists raised as high as our hopes for the future of the Pakistani revolution, Revolutionary Initiative, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist pre-party formation in Canada, offers a red salute to the comrades convening the August 2010 7th National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party (Pakistan Workers and Peasants Party).

We understand that the 7th Congress will mark a return of the PMKP to the Maoist origins of the party, as established by its founders Major Ishaq Mohammed, Afzal Bungish, Eric Sperian, and Ghulam Nabi Kaloo in the 1960s.

The new program of the PMKP will effect a decisive break with the pseudo-alternatives currently being presented to the people of Pakistan: the perpetuation of a backward semi-colonial, semi-feudal society maintained by the pro-imperialist military and civil bureaucracy, comprador bourgeoisie, and feudal ruling elite; versus the equally backward social program offered up by the Taliban of Pakistan. By breaking with the revisionist Left, which looks to U.S. imperialism for enlightenment through its brutal “War on Terror”, the PMKP is setting a course to truly rally the peasants, proletarians, and the progressive petty-bourgeois elements to the anti-imperialist cause.

Further, by exposing the program of the Taliban as fascism in a different form, the PMKP has truly placed itself at the vanguard of all the toiling masses in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s lackeys to the imperialists and the Taliban only appear to be irreconcilably opposing forces, but in practice they are two sides of the same coin. The world will never forget that it was U.S. imperialism, during the course of the Cold War, which helped create the Taliban with the unwavering support of the Pakistani state.

Due to the Pakistani ruling classes’ subservience to U.S. imperialism, the vast majority paid a steep price for the maintenance of the country’s incredible state of economic backwardness. Today, this relationship has brought only new sufferings, with U.S. imperialism raining down drone attacks upon the heads of Pakistani civilians.

With a population of 170 million people, 4

As the PMKP’s new draft program reads, it is the semi-colonial aspect of Pakistan’s countryside that remains the “main obstacle to the release of productive forces and the progress of our country”. This is what makes the heavily exploited and oppressed peasantry the “main force in the peoples democratic revolution carried out under the leadership of the proletariat.”

It is these conditions that make Pakistan ripe for People’s War. If the Maoists do not lead the struggle of the people, the Islamic forces will continue to prevail in their reactionary mobilization of the masses in their pseudo-opposition to U.S. imperialism.

The floods that are currently ravaging Pakistan, bringing great misery and dislocation to as much as 1

It is our hope that the floods do not derail the plans for the 7th Congress, but if they do, we know it will be because of the urgent need for the revolutionary vanguard to serve and guide the people in a time of great hardship. It is inevitable that the imperialists and the reactionaries in Pakistan will use the catastrophes to strengthen their legitimacy and order, just as the imperialists and reactionaries have done in Haiti with the great earthquake there in January 2010.

In addition to the great consequences that the rise of the Pakistani Maoist movement will have at the domestic level, the Pakistani revolution would also affect historic transformations at the regional and world levels.

Regionally, the revolution in Pakistan would carry the revolutionary tide sweeping South Asia deeper into the Muslim world, breaking the monopoly of the clerical fascists in the struggle against imperialism, which they do not fundamentally oppose and do so in appearance only for their own opportunistic and self-aggrandizing purposes.

At the world level, the rise of a revolutionary communist tide in Pakistan would deal a blow to the ideological basis of the imperialist ‘War on Terror’. In the Western imperialist countries, Muslims are being scapegoated to divert the rest of the masses from the true geopolitical and economic interests of the NATO bloc of imperialists: to plunder the world, exploit the toiling masses, and gain the upper hand in the inter-imperialist competition with the other imperialists and regional geopolitical rivals, especially Russia and China.

The masses in the West are blackmailed into supporting the imperialist war of aggression in Afghanistan through the specter of Taliban rule. But we know that the war against the Taliban, a war on domestic reactionaries and exploiting classes, can only be the class war of the toiling masses, not the imperialists. The world was reminded of this on May 1st, 2010 when the PMKP rallied and marched in North-West Frontier Province for the support of the revolution in Nepal.

We look forward, comrades, to the great feats that the people of Pakistan will achieve under the leadership of genuine communists guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and we will show the masses in our country that the people of Pakistan are our friends and comrades, and that they strive for genuine democracy, for socialism and for communism, just like ourselves.

If the PMKP, alongside our comrades of the Shola Jawid (Communist Party Maoist of Afghanistan) and Sarbederan (Communist Party of Iran-Maoist), successfully organize and arouse the masses for national democratic revolution by way of anti-imperialist People’s Wars in Central and South Asia, genuine communists all around the world will rally to your cause, learn important lessons from your struggle, and promote them amongst the proletarians of their home countries.

If the PMKP holds fast to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism after the convention of the 7th National Congress, deeply uprooting the revisionism of the past decades, and boldly applies MLM to the conditions of Pakistan, then a glorious future lays ahead for the people of Pakistan and South and Central Asia. The era of imperialism is the era of world proletarian revolution. In this phase imperialism’s strategic decline, the phase of the second great crisis of capitalist imperialism that has plagued the world since the early 1970s, the conditions for proletarian revolution are inexorably improving.

Finally, this message of solidarity would not be complete without our own organization clearly identifying Canadian imperialism as a leading enemy of the people of the world, including the people of your country. A leading player in the occupation of Afghanistan and NATO is Canadian imperialism, the basis of which is Canadian monopoly-finance capital. As the imperialist war in Afghanistan more and more spills over into your country, your connection to the Canadian proletariat’s revolutionary struggle deepens more and more.

The proletarian youth who are being sent to Afghanistan only to return to Canada in body bags are also the victims of imperialist war, but they must be driven from Afghanistan just the same. The ruinous war in Afghanistan sets the basis for revolutionary agitation amongst the soldiers, no less than the Korean War and the Vietnam War radicalized whole generations of youth and soldiers in the West.

Together, let us hasten the movement towards socialism and communism on a world scale before the imperialists drag us further into a hellish world of war, avertable disasters, ecological catastrophe, and the day-to-day grinding exploitation and oppression of capitalism.

Red salute to the PMKP for taking up the banner of Marxism-Leninism- Maoism!

Onwards with the People’s War in Pakistan!

From Canada to Pakistan, long live the international proletarian revolution.

Revisions to Races of Man Classification

Repost from the old site.

Click to enlarge. This is the chart from the paper, The Origin of Minnan & Hakka, the So-called “Taiwanese”, Inferred by HLA Study, utilized in this post.

I usually try to be very conservative about adding in new races to my races of man post, but sometimes I just feel like I’m forced to. Based on this article, and in particular, the figure above, forced me to make some new splits.

The question was what to do about the Taiwanese people. Not the Taiwan aborigines – but the Hakka and Min Nan people of SE China who settled in Taiwan in the past 400 years. It turns out that they appear to be a discrete race, and that they are linked to Singapore Chinese and the Thai Chinese. In Singapore and Thailand, Chinese form a market-dominant minority position.

They are a minority of the population, but they tend to run businesses and be very wealthy. Similar cases are seen in Indonesia and the Philippines, where tiny Chinese minorities of 2-

So the interesting question arises – who exactly are the Chinese minorities of Thailand and Singapore? By genetic studies, we can now see that they are SE Chinese people related to the Min Nan and the Hakka.

The Min Nan and Hakka both speak languages that are called Chinese dialects, but in reality, they are completely separate languages. Both languages are doing fine – Min Nan (Southern Min) with 49 million speakers and Hakka with 34 million speakers.

Min Nan and Hakka both strangely lack official status anywhere, although Southern Min is widely spoken in Taiwan. It’s odd that some of the world’s most widely spoken languages lack official status – Min Nan is the 24th largest language, and Hakka is the 35th largest language, in terms of numbers of speakers.

Both languages are vigorous and are in good shape. Southern Min has a roman script that is fairly widely used. Hakka also has a roman script, but I am not sure how widely it is used.

Southern Min is actually a number of separate languages: Min Nan proper, Amoy, Click to enlarge. Here is a map of the various Chinese languages. These are not Chinese dialects, but actual separate languages. Some may be dialects of other Chinese languages though. The main languages are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, Xiang, Hakka and Gan. Ping, Hui and Jin are classed above as dialects of those larger languages.Jin is classed as a dialect of Mandarin, but it is actually a separate language with 45 million speakers, making it around the 25th largest language in the world.Min is said 5 separate languages, but it is actually many separate languages. The 5 separate recognized languages are Min Nan, Min Dong, Min Zhong, Min Bei and Puxian. Min Nan itself is a number of separate languages. Huizhou, or Hui, is a separate language that is actually a set of related languages. Wu is more than one language.

Ping is traditionally considered to be part of Cantonese, but it is a separate language. Mandarin is also a set of related languages instead of one language. Cantonese is also be more than one language. Hakka is also be more than one language.

It is nonsense to say someone speaks “Chinese”. There is no such thing as a language called “Chinese”.

Instead, there are various languages in the Chinese language family – at least 14 separate languages, and actually many more. Mandarin is by far the largest of these languages, and most of the smaller languages are suffering under the influence of Mandarin. In addition, the Chinese government favors Mandarin and does not support the other languages much, if at all.

I also split off a group called the Li and another group called the Oroqen based on the chart above.

The Li are a transitional group between the Northern Chinese and the Southern Chinese, though they live on Hainan Island in the far south of China. They speak a Tai-Kadai language called Hlai which has 667,000 speakers. Use is vigorous; the language is doing well, but it is generally not written, although a Roman script exists. Mandarin is used for writing.

The Oroqen are nomadic people who live in far northeastern China and speak a Tungusic tongue. As you can see from the chart, they are closer to the Japanese than to the NE Chinese. There are only 1,200 speakers left out of a small 7,000 population, but there are 800 monolinguals, and use is vigorous by those who speak the language.

They live by hunting and used to practice shamanism. They still lack an official script for their language, but there are radio programs in Oroqen.

The truth is that both the Oroqen people and their language are in poor shape, and most of the blame can be placed on the Communist Chinese regime, even though the regime has also done many good things for the Oroqen. The Cultural Revolution in particular was a period of insanity, stupidity and terror.

An Oroqen Race was added to the NE Asian Major Race due to the extreme divergence of these people. I also added Inner Mongolians to the Mongolian Race inside of NE Asian.

I added the Buyei to the Tai Race within the SE Asian Major Race and created a new race called SE Chinese Race, consisting of Min Nan, Hakka, Singapore Chinese and Thai Chinese. The Buyei live in southern China and northern Vietnam and speak a Tai language that has over 2 million speakers yet has no official status. Buyei language use is vigorous, and it is in good shape.

There is a romanized script, and there are newspapers in the language, but they mostly use Mandarin for writing. The Buyei language is probably made up of a few separate languages, because some of the dialects are not mutually intelligible. The language is very close to the Zhuang language.

The SE Chinese Race really consists of the descendants of the ancient Chinese people known as the Yueh. The Yueh, or Yue, formed a state in southeastern coastal China during the Warring States Period and the Spring and Autumn Period. The state lasted from about 525 BC to 334 BC. The Chinese were already involved in metallurgy and were producing excellent swords during these periods.

The new lineup looks like this:

Northeast Asian Major Race*

Japanese-Korean Race Southern Japanese Race (Honshu Kinki – Kyushu) Ryukyuan Race Ainu Race*** Gilyak Race** Northern Chinese Race (Northern Chinese – Qiang – Manchu – Hui) Oroqen Race Sherpa-Yakut Race Nepalese Race (Nepali – Newari) Mongolian Race (Mongolian – Inner Mongolian – Buryat – Kazakh) Northern Turkic Race (Dolgan – Altai – Shor – Tofalar – Uighur – Chelkan – Soyot – Kumandin Teleut – Hazara)*** Central Asian Race (Kirghiz – Karalkalpak – Uzbek – Turkmen) Tuva Race Tungus Race (Even – Evenki – Russian Saami) Siberian Race Beringian Race** (Chukchi – Aleut – Siberian Eskimo) Koryak-Itelmen Race Reindeer Chukchi Race General Tibetan Race (Tibetan – Lisu – Nu – Karen – Tujia – Hui – Akha – Burmese – Bai – Yizu – Pnar – Mizo) Bhutanese Race Siberian Uralic Race (Nentsy – Samoyed – Ket – Mansi – Khanty) Nganasan Race Uralic Race (Komi – Mari) North American Eskimo Race

Southeast Asian Major Race*

Southern Chinese Race (Hmong – Mien – Dong – Henan Han – Yi – Naxi) Li Race Southeast China Race (Hakka – Min Nan – Singapore Chinese – Thai Chinese) South China Sea Race (Filipino – Ami Taiwanese Aborigine – Guangdong Han) Tai Race (Thai – Lao – Lahu – Aini – Deang – Blang – Shan – Dai – Vietnamese – Muong – Buyei) Kachin Race (Kachin – Va – Nung – Lu) General Taiwanese Aborigine Race (Ayatal – Bunun – Yami) Island SE Asian Race (Paiwan Taiwanese Aborigine – Sea Dayak – Sumatran – Balinese) Indonesian Race (Sulawesi – Borneo – Lesser Sunda) Malay Race (Javanese – Sarawak – Malaysia) Zhuang Race (Senoi – Zhuang – She – Santhal – Ho – Nicobarese) Austroasiatic Race (Mon – Khmer – Khasi – Nongtrai – Bhoi – Maram – Kynriam – Wajaintia) Meghalaya NE Indian Race (Khasi – Garo – Lyngngam) Philippines Negrito Race (Aeta – Ati – Palau Micronesian) Mamanwa Philippines Negrito Race Andaman Islands Negrito Race** Semang Malay Negrito Race***

References

Lin M, Chu CC, Chang SL, Lee HL, Loo JH, Akaza T, Juji T, Ohashi J, Tokunaga K. March 2001. The Origin of Minnan & Hakka, the So-called “Taiwanese”, Inferred by HLA Study. Tissue Antigens:57(3):192-9.

The Peopling of Indonesia

Repost from the old site. Updated September 20, 2016. I am republishing this post because I have significantly reworked the genetics of the Indonesians. Instead of being mostly Austronesians from Taiwan, I now say they are mostly related to an ancient Melanesian Dai group from SE China that came 10-20,000 years ago. This group imposed itself on the original people, who were Papuans. Later, Austronesians came through, leaving languages but only some genes. The breakdown of Indonesians is approximately 7 The ancient Dai appear to have undergone the same progression towards Mongoloid as occurred with Melanesians throughout Inland SE Asia. In island SE Asia (Melanesia) and the East of Indonesia, this progression was much less complete, so people still have strong Melanesian elements. The degree to which some Melanesians resemble Negritos is rather striking. To sum up, the new data indicates that most Indonesians are not related primarily to Taiwanese aborigines as originally thought. Instead they are related to Daics from far SE China who left their homeland during post-glacial flooding that occurred after 18,000 years ago. Only 2 The prehistory of Indonesia is an interesting question, but it is little studied.

Typical Indonesian men. The one on the left looks very Chinese or Filipino. The one on the right looks a little different. Indonesians are dark, but the place is right on the equator, so this is to be expected.

  Very early man, Homo Erectus, has been found in the islands dating way back. A multiregional theory has been suggested for the evolution of man in Indonesia, China and maybe other areas. This theory has been rejected, however there may be some continuity in China with older forms dating back 120,000 years or so. The Chinese, Japanese and now Indonesians all want to say they came from a different monkey. The theory is also very popular with White Nationalists who are extremely insulted by the idea of being descended from African Blacks. In Indonesia and China, these ideas have more to do with the spread of idiotically antiscientific nationalist-based theories than anything else. In Indonesia, the nation’s top archaeologist deliberately destroyed bones of Homo Florensis recently in spite over the rejection of his pet theory, that the Homo Erectus relative that lived in modern times are just modern humans who are microencephalic. This theory seems crazy but is making the rounds in peer-reviewed journals nevertheless. Nationalism and science has never worked well, with some particularly gruesome results especially in the past century. Florensis is a tiny midget of an early man who is a different species from us. They may have lived up until 150 years ago, but the hard evidence so far shows they lived until 13,000 years ago at the latest. I believe they lived until the arrival of the Europeans. It is possible some may yet exist to this day. There are a lot of questions about whether or not Florensis and locals bred in. Some of the locals are very short, and some even think they may have Florensis like features. Locals say that the Little People are their ancestors. The Little People would come to their villages and hide in the forest watching them. Locals would leave food for the Little People in baskets, and the Little People would come when no one was around and take the food – they were described as very shy. It is amazing that such a primitive man could live in such proximity to modern Homo without genocidal results. In the past, contacts between more modern civilizations and more primitive ones usually had genocidal results. Examples include Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Africa, the Americas, Siberia, and probably other places. Before Florensis, there is Java Man, who dates back possibly to 2 million years. It is due to the prominence of Java Man that the Indonesian “scientists” have indulged in their childish and petty behavior. Actually, the Indonesian case above is more complicated than that – the destroyer of the skulls is the grand old man of Indonesian archeology, and he cannot be touched. There are a number of younger archaeologists there who think the man is an old fool, which he is, but no can do a thing about him. The question of Homo Erectus being put aside, we now turn to the development of modern Homo in Indonesia. Here, very little is known for some reason, but we do have that 33,000 yr. old find in the Malukus. These people are called Melanesians for lack of a better word, but it also appears that there were cultural contacts with Australians across the straights. I believe that a better term for these early people is Papuans. At this time, Melanesians were probably generalized all throughout SE Asia. Sometime around 10-15,000 years ago, these Papuans populated most of the Mulukus. The nature of the aforementioned contacts with the Australians, genetic or otherwise, is not known, but that such early modern man had such excellent boats is stunning. Much is made by racists of the primitiveness and low IQ’s of Aborigines. However, we should note the profound cultural achievement it took to make those boats to get to Australia in the first place. But we had great boats when we first left the African Horn at Somalia and Djibouti, went to Yemen and moved along the coast all the say to SE Asia, stopping along the way in Iran, Yemen, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, New Guinea, Melanesia and Australia. There is a chain of Negritos in every one of these places, probably the last remainders of the first modern men that left Africa 60-70,000 years. In Australia, the Negritos went to the Aborigine Major Race; in Papua, they went to the Papuan Major Race, in Melanesia to the Melanesian Minor Race. However, recent data suggests that the Melanesian race is extremely diverse, so it may have to be re-evaluated. Some analyses show Melanesians clustering fairly close to Papuans, yet others show Papuans as a vast major race, tied with Aborigines as the most diverse on Earth after Africans. They are also some of the furthest away from Africans. Whites are more closely related to Africans than Papuans are, yet everyone from Afrocentrists to White Nationalists wants to say Papuans are Black people. In the North, they went on to form the early basis for all members of the Asian Macro-race today. The standard history is that some unknown Melanesians, about whom we know little, were the original inhabitants of Indonesia. Recent research sheds some light on the genesis of these Melanesians. Turner, a specialist in teeth, using dental morphological traits, hypothesized that two migrations originated from central China about 20-30,000 YBP (years before present). One group, the Sinodonts, expanded northward into China, Siberia and across the Bering land bridge to the New World. The second group, the Sundadonts, moved southward into Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and later through Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. This is probably the group that gave rise to the Melanesians. But the picture is more complicated than that. Indonesia was settled independently by ancient Dai. These Dai came from from Hainan and Guangxi in far southern China about 10-20,000 YBP. They may have left due to rising sea levels that flooded their lands. The ancient Dai must have looked like Melanesians. The people most closely resembling the ancient Dai are the Taiwan aborigines. It is true that the Indonesians do not much resemble the Taiwan aborigines genetically, and their genetic structure in general is quite a bit different from Filipinos. However, this study does not explain how Indonesians came to speak Austronesian languages obviously derived ultimately from Taiwan. It is clear to me that when the Austronesians pushed through Indonesia several thousand years ago, the locals adopted the Austronesian tongues of the Austronesian colonizers, abandoning whatever tongues they were speaking at the time (I figure Papuan languages). Recent tests indicate that the Indonesians derive 7 They probably genetically swamped and colonized the native peoples, who were probably Papuans. Today, only the Malukus identify as Melanesians, despite the fact that there are Melanesians on Alor and in other places. On Timor, Sumba and Flores, there are people who are at least part-Melanesian who do not identify as Melanesian. Some of these people are up to 8 The standard history of the rest of the islands such as Sulawesi, Sumatra and Bali is that Austronesians came 4,000 years ago and pushed the native Melanesians to the east. However, this must be wrong. Instead of pushing Melanesians east, they bred in with them. Most Indonesians are an example of a race that used be common all through SE Asia, including Vietnam – the Ancient SE Asian Race. This race was widespread throughout SE Asia 2-4,000 years ago. It is Mongoloid with considerable Australoid admixture.

Tsunami victims in Aceh on Sumatra. They are quite dark as you can see, but that is a pigmentation process to enable females to store folic acid for pregnancy in order to give birth to viable infants. Protection against sunburn is an interesting theory, but sunburn, even melanoma, does not kill you before you have children.
They are members of the Island SE Asian Race. They may have an origin in part with the Paiwan aborigines of Taiwan.

  The Sumba and probably all of the other Lesser Sunda Islands are inhabited by people who are a mixture between Austronesians from Taiwan and native Melanesians – Ancient SE Asians, as described above. Timor also has Papuans and Polynesians. Early man arrived on Timor as early as 40,000 years ago. These people must have been Papuans. The Mulukus such as Babar and Ambon are inhabited by mixtures of Austronesians from Taiwan and Papuans in the case of Ambon and Melanesians in the case of Babar. 4,000 YBP, the Austronesians arrived in Indonesia from Taiwan. Mostly, these were the Ami, but there is a possibility that other Taiwanese aborigines were there also, in particular, the Paiwan. These were the Austronesians, the greatest mariners of all time, who settled the Philippines, Indonesia, coastal New Guinea, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. There are even said to have moved into mainland SE Asia, particularly Malaysia. In that case, they probably went to Sumatra first and then moved across the water to Malaysia.

These Indonesian Muslim women praying look very much like Malays. It is not known where they are from. They may be members of the Malay Race found on Java and Borneo in Indonesia described at the end of the post.

  They even seem to be a major component of the Vietnamese. Everywhere they went, the Austronesians brought a cultural revolution with them, often upgrading existing cultures, certainly so in the case of New Guinea. Austronesians arrived in Indonesia at least 4,000 years ago by boat, probably from the Philippines, where they already probably had a mature settlement. However, the Austronesians show up in Timor as early as 5,000 years ago, so 4,000 years BP may be too late. Next, at least on Timor, and probably throughout Indonesia, a wave of Proto-Malays moved through. A group settled Bali 5,000 years ago who may have been Proto-Malays. Proto-Malays are also important in the settlement of the Philippines and Malaysia. The proto-Malays who settled in the Philippines were said to be short and very hairy. The hairiness is odd for people living in a hot climate. If this description is true, I suggest that the Proto-Malay may have been an Ainu-like people, the Proto-NE Asians. A Southern origin is possible for the Ainu. The pre-Ainu, the Jomon, are said to have origins in Thailand 18,000 years ago. They got on boats and sailed to Japan. These hairy Proto-Malays may have been related to the pre-Jomon in Thailand long ago. Proto-Malays show up in the Philippines over 5,000 years BP, before the arrival of the Austronesians. The Proto-Malays who settled the Philippines and Indonesia are said to have had an origin in South China and Inland SE Asia. However, in Malaysia, the Proto-Malay are said to have been created in Malaysia 3,000 years ago as Austronesians bred in with existing Senoi, an Australoid, Negrito-like, or best of all, Veddoid people. The Proto-Malays are poorly understood, and some of what is said about them is contradictory. Austronesians show up in Sulawesi, Java, the Mulukus and Borneo 3,500 years ago. Austronesians moved from Borneo to Sumatra 2,500 years ago, and from there up into Malaysia to become a component of the Malay Race.

A beautiful woman on Samosir Island on Sumatra. She may be a Toba Batak, who are members of the Micronesian Race. Unless I am hallucinating, I think that many Micronesians look something like this. A possible explanation is that the Batak are the remains of those Austronesian-Melanesian mixes who populated Polynesia and then left Polynesia to populate Micronesia, but the situation is quite confused. In the background is one of the famous Toba Batak bark houses. She is in traditional dress. Note the resemblance to a Filipina. The Batak, like the Sea Dayak of northern Borneo and the Nesiot and Igorot of the Philippines, are linked to the first Austronesian wave out of Taiwan 5,000 years ago. This group is also linked to the Paiwan tribe on Taiwan.

  A cultural revolution in Indonesia called Đông Sơn was paralleled by similar developments throughout SE Asia. This culture was centered in the Red River Valley of northern Vietnam and northward in Southern Kwangzi and Kwangtung of China, while being generalized throughout Indonesia, showing up about 3,000 years ago. Originally, the Đông Sơn were said to be Austronesians, but the latest thinking is that this is an ancient Tai group. Wet-rice cultivation spread throughout the islands with Đông Sơn, but the native Melanesians were already engaging in wet-rice cultivation an incredible 10,000 years ago, making Indonesia one of the earliest sites for agriculture on Earth. The Đông Sơn culture was developing in Vietnam from 2,200-2,800 YBP. The Đông Sơn kept buffaloes and pigs, fished, grew rice and, in a clue to their Austronesian nature, sailed in long dugout canoes. An Iron Age people, they utilized metallurgy to make fine bronze objects, including drums and figurines. Racially, the Đông Sơn peoples belonged to the Indonesian or Ancient Southeast Asian group – a Southern Mongoloid with strong Australoid elements (Cuong, 1996). Đông Sơn also had elements of Dai culture from Yunnan and Laos, Khmer culture from Cambodia, Tibeto-Burman culture, and the prehistoric Plain of Jars culture in Laos. So all of these elements from mainland SE Asia and Southern China went into the stew that became Indonesian culture. Now, Indonesians are members of either the SE Asian Major Race, the Oceanian Major Race or the Papuan Major Race. For the most part, they seem to be some sort of a mixture between ancient Daic Melanesians and Austronesian Chinese (Taiwanese). Haplogroups C, E and F in Figure 1 here, seem to have a southern origin. These strains are apparent on a minor scale in Java, Borneo and Sulawesi. But in Southern Borneo, they reach levels up to 4 L is clearly the Ami of Taiwan, but G and H are less well-understood. This paper suggests that they have a southern (Melanesian) genesis, but that does not make much sense. H is present at high levels in the Taiwanese Atayal, Bunum and Paiwan, and G is present at high levels in the Bunum and the Paiwan. G is at even higher levels in Javans.

Some beautiful typical Indonesian women with the usual phenotype. Note the resemblance with Thais, Filipinas, and possibly Khmers. These women are Torajans, who look somewhat like the Batak people pictured above. 

  On a principle coordinates map here (Figure 4), Indonesians cluster close to Filipinos, the Ami of Taiwan and Southern Chinese. Indonesians today constitute several races. Papuans and Melanesians were mentioned above. The Toba Batak are Micronesians, but how they ended up in northern Sumatra is a mystery. Indonesians on Java and northern Borneo are members of the Malay Race, also found in Malaysia. Indonesians from Sumatra, Bali and the Sea Dayak of northern Borneo, along with the Paiwan aborigines from Taiwan, are members of the Island SE Asian Race. The Sea Dayak are also linked anthropologically with the first wave of Austronesians out of Taiwan 5,000 years ago, along with the Nesiot and Igorot in the Philippines. The suggestion is that the first wave of Austronesians may have been related to the Paiwan tribe. This clustering is odd, and suggests that the Paiwan, in addition to the Ami, may have been among the Austronesian seafarers who populated Indonesia.

Click to view details. Map showing the Paiwan, Atayal, Bunum and Ami aborigines of Taiwan. The Paiwan seem to have a relationship with the Sea Dayak of North Borneo, the Balinese, and the Sumatrans. This indicates that the Paiwan, located on the lower right on the map, may have helped to settle Indonesia as Austronesians along with the Ami who are usually associated with Austronesians. Note that both the Paiwan and the Ami were properly positioned to colonize island SE Asia.

  The Indonesians of Sulawesi, the Lesser Sundas and Borneo are members of the mainstream Indonesian Race.

References

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). History and Geography of Human Genes . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Cuong, N.L. 1996. Anthropological Research on Đông Sơnian Skeletons (in Vietnamese). Hanoi. Li H, Wen B, Chen SJ, Su B, Pramoonjago P, Liu Y, Pan S, Qin Z, Liu W, Cheng X, Yang N, Li X, Tran D, Lu D, Hsu MT, Deka R, Marzuki S, Tan CC, Jin L. 2008. Paternal Genetic Affinity Between Western Austronesians and Daic Populations. BMC Evol Biol. 8(1):146. Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. (2000). The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution.

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The Peopling of the Philippines

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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