Man, Past and Present - Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (most popular novels txt) 📗

in the bachelors' and spinsters' quarters respectively. A man is not regarded as an independent member of the community till he is married and has a child. There is no organised polity. Generally one man excels the rest in hunting, warfare, wisdom and kindliness, and he is deferred to, and becomes, in a sense, chief. A regular feature of Andamanese social life is the meeting at intervals between two or more communities. A visit of a few days is paid and presents are exchanged between hosts and guests, the time being spent in hunting, feasting and dancing.

No forms of worship have been noticed, but there is a belief in various kinds of spirits, the most important of whom is Biliku, usually regarded as female, who is identified with the north-east monsoon and is paired with Tarai the south-west monsoon. Biliku and Tarai are the producers of rain, storms, thunder and lightning. Fire was stolen from Biliku. There is always great fluidity in native beliefs, so some tribes regard Puluga (Biliku) as a male. Three things make Biliku angry and cause her to send storms; melting or burning of bees-wax, interfering in any way with a certain number of plants, and killing a cicada or making a noise during the time the cicadae are singing. A. R. Brown[346] gives an interesting explanation of this curious belief. Biliku is supposed to have a human form but nobody ever sees her. Her origin is unknown. The idea of her being a creator is local and is probably secondary, she does not concern herself with human actions other than those noted above.

H. Man has carefully studied and reduced to writing the Andamanese language, of which there are at least nine distinct varieties, corresponding to as many tribal groups. It has no clear affinities to any other tongue[347], the supposed resemblances to Dravidian and Australian being extremely slight, if not visionary. Its phonetic system is astonishingly rich (no less than 24 vowels and 17 consonants, but no sibilants), while the arithmetic stops at two. Nobody ever attempts to count in any way beyond ten, which is reached by a singular process. First the nose is tapped with the finger-tips of either hand, beginning with the little finger, and saying ubatul (one), then ikpor (two) with the next, after which each successive tap makes anka, "and this." When the thumb of the second hand is reached, making ten, both hands are brought together to indicate 5 + 5, and the sum is clenched with the word arduru = "all." But this feat is exceptional, and usually after two you get only words answering to several, many, numerous, countless, which flight of imagination is reached at about 6 or 7.

Yet with their infantile arithmetic these paradoxical islanders have contrived to develop an astonishingly intricate form of speech characterised by an absolutely bewildering superfluity of pronominal and other elements. Thus the possessive pronouns have as many as sixteen possible variants according to the class of noun (human objects, parts of the body, degrees of kinship, etc.) with which they are in agreement. For instance, my is dia, dot, dong, dig, dab, dar, daka, doto, dai, dar, ad, ad-en, deb, with man, head, wrist, mouth, father, son, step-son, wife, etc. etc.; and so with thy, his, our, your, their! This grouping of nouns in classes is analogous to the Bantu system, and it is curious to note that the number of classes is about the same. On the other hand there is a wealth of postfixes attached as in normal agglutinating forms of speech, so that "in adding their affixes they follow the principles of the ordinary agglutinative tongues; in adding their prefixes they follow the well-defined principles of the South African tongues. Hitherto, as far as I know, the two principles in full play have never been found together in any other language.... In Andamanese both are fully developed, so much so as to interfere with each other's grammatical functions[348]." The result often is certain sesquipedalia verbacomparable in length to those of the American polysynthetic languages. A savage people, who can hardly count beyond two, possessed of about the most intricate language spoken by man, is a psychological puzzle which I cannot profess to fathom.

In the Malay Peninsula the indigenous element is certainly the Negrito, who, known by many names--Semang, Udai, Pangan, Hami, Menik or Mandi--forms a single ethnical group presenting some striking analogies with the Andamanese. But, surrounded from time out of mind by Malay peoples, some semi-civilised, some nearly as wild as themselves, but all alike slowly crowding them out of the land, these aborigines have developed defensive qualities unneeded by the more favoured insular Negritoes, while their natural development has been arrested at perhaps a somewhat lower plane of culture. In fact, doomed to extinction before their time came, they never have had a chance in the race, as Hugh Clifford sings in The Song of the Last Semangs:

The paths are rough, the trails are blind The Jungle People tread; The yams are scarce and hard to find With which our folk are fed.

We suffer yet a little space Until we pass away, The relics of an ancient race That ne'er has had its day.

In physical features they in many respects resemble the Andamanese. Their hair is short, universally woolly and black, the skin colour dark chocolate brown approximating to glossy black[349], sometimes with a reddish tinge[350]. There is very little evidence for the stature but the 17 males measured by Annandale and Robinson[351] averaged 1.52 m. (5 ft. 0-1/4 in.). The average cephalic index is about 78 to 79, extremes ranging from 74 to 84. The face is round, the forehead rounded, narrow and projecting, or as it were "swollen." The nose is short and flattened, with remarkable breadth and distended nostrils. The nasal index of five adult males was 101.2[352]. The cheekbones are broad and the jaws often protrude slightly; the lips are as a rule thick. Martin remarks that characteristic both of Semang and Sakai[353] is the great thickening of the integumental part of the upper lip, the whole mouth region projecting from the lower edge of the nose. This convexity occurs in 79 per cent., and is well shown in his photographs[354].

Hugh Clifford, who has been intimately associated with the "Orang-utan" (Wild-men) as the Malays often call them, describes those of the Plus River valley as "like African Negroes seen through the reverse end of a field-glass. They are sooty-black in colour; their hair is short and woolly, clinging to the scalp in little crisp curls; their noses are flat, their lips protrude, and their features are those of the pure negroid type. They are sturdily built and well set upon their legs, but in stature little better than dwarfs. They live by hunting, and have no permanent dwellings, camping in little family groups wherever, for the moment, game is most plentiful[355]."

Their shelters--huts they cannot be called--are exactly like the frailest of the Andamanese, mere lean-to's of matted palm-leaves crazily propped on rough uprights; clothes they have next to none, and their food is chiefly yams and other jungle roots, fish from the stream, and sun-dried monkey, venison and other game, this term having an elastic meaning. Salt, being rarely obtainable, is a great luxury, as amongst almost all wild tribes. They are a nomadic people living by collecting and hunting; the wilder ones will often not remain longer than three days in one place. Very few have taken to agriculture. They make use of bamboo rafts for drifting down stream but have no canoes. All men are on an equal footing, but each tribe has a head, who exercises authority. Division of labour is fairly even between men and women. The men hunt, and the women build the shelters and cook the food. They are strictly monogamous and faithful.

All the faculties are sharpened mainly in the quest of food and of means to elude the enemy now closing round their farthest retreats in the upland forests. When hard pressed and escape seems impossible, they will climb trees and stretch rattan ropes from branch to branch where these are too wide apart to be reached at a bound, and along such frail aerial bridges women and all will pass with their cooking-pots and other effects, with their babies also at the breast, and the little ones clinging to their mother's heels. For like the Andamanese they love their women-folk and children, and in this way rescue them from the Malay raiders and slavers. But unless the British raj soon intervenes their fate is sealed. They may slip from the Malays, but not from their own traitorous kinsmen, who often lead the hunt, and squat all night long on the tree tops, calling one to another and signalling from these look-outs when the leaves rustle and the rattans are heaved across, so that nothing can be done, and another family group is swept away into bondage.

From their physical resemblance, undoubted common descent, and geographical proximity, one might also expect to find some affinity in the speech of the Andaman and Malay Negritoes. But H. Clifford, who made a special study of the dialects on the mainland, discovered no points of contact between them and any other linguistic group[356]. This, however, need cause no surprise, being in no discordance with recognised principles. As in the Andamans, stone implements have been found in the Peninsula, and specimens are now in the Pitt-Rivers collection at Oxford[357]. But the present aborigines do not make or use such tools, and there is good reason for thinking that they were the work of their ancestors, arriving, as in the Andamans, in the remote past. Hence the two groups have been separated for many thousands of years, and their speech has diverged too widely to be now traced back to a common source.

With the Negritoes of the Philippines we enter a region of almost hopeless ethnical complications[358], amid which, however, the dark dwarfish Aeta peoples crop out almost everywhere as the indigenous element. The Aeta live in the mountainous districts of the larger islands, and in some of the smaller islands of the Philippines, and the name is conveniently extended to the various groups of Philippine Negritoes, many of whom show the results of mixture with other peoples. Their hair is universally woolly, usually of a dirty black colour, often sun-burnt on the top to a reddish brown. The skin is dark chocolate brown rather than black, sometimes with a yellowish tinge. The average stature of 48 men was 1.46 m. (4 ft. 9 in.), but showed considerable range. The typical nose is broad, flat, and bridgeless, with prominent arched nostrils, the average nasal index for males being 102, and for females 105[359]. The lips are thick, but not protruding, sometimes showing a pronounced convexity between the upper lip and the nose.

John Foreman[360] noted the curious fact that the Aeta were recognised as the owners of the soil long after the arrival of the Malayan intruders.

"For a long time they were the sole masters of Luzon Island, where they exercised seignorial rights over the Tagalogs and other immigrants, until these arrived in such numbers, that the Negritoes were forced to the highlands.

"The taxes imposed upon the primitive Malay settlers by the Negritoes were levied in kind, and, when payment was refused, they swooped down in a posse, and carried off the head of the defaulter. Since the arrival of the Spaniards terror of the white man has made them take definitely to the mountains, where they appear to be very gradually decreasing[361]."

At first sight it may seem unaccountable that a race of such extremely low intellect should be able to assert their supremacy in this way over the intruding Malayans, assumed to be so much their superiors in physical and mental qualities. But it has to be considered that the invasions took place in very remote times, ages before the appearance on the scene of the semi-civilised Muhammadan