Australo-Melanesians (also known as Australasians or the Australomelanesoid, Australoid or Australioid race) is an outdated historical grouping of various people indigenous to Melanesia and Australia. Controversially, some groups found in parts of Southeast Asia and South Asia were also sometimes included.
The concept of dividing humankind into three, four or five races (often called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid) was introduced in the 18th century and further developed by Western scholars in the context of "racist ideologies"[3] during the age of colonialism.[3] With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in “races” as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."[3]
Terminological history
The term "Australoid" was coined in ethnology in the mid 19th century, describing tribes or populations "of the type of native Australians".[4] The term "Australioid race" was introduced by Thomas Huxley in 1870 to refer to certain peoples indigenous to South and Southeast Asia and Oceania.[5] In physical anthropology, Australoid is used for morphological features characteristic of Aboriginal Australians by Daniel John Cunningham in his Text-book of Anatomy (1902). An Australioid (sic, with an additional -i-) racial group was first proposed by Thomas Huxley in an essay On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind (1870), in which he divided humanity into four principal groups (Xanthochroic, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australioid).[6] His original model included the native inhabitants of Deccan in India under the Australoid category, specifically "in a well-marked form" among the hill tribes of the Deccan Plateau. Huxley further classified the Melanochroi (Peoples of the Mediterranean race) as a mixture of the Xanthochroi (northern Europeans) and Australioids.[7]
Huxley (1870) described Australioids as dolichocephalic; their hair as usually silky, black and wavy or curly, with large, heavy jaws and prognathism, with skin the color of chocolate and irises which are dark brown or black.[8]
The term "Proto-Australoid" was used by Roland Burrage Dixon in his Racial History of Man (1923). In The Origin of Races (1962), Carleton Coon expounded his system of five races (Australoid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Congoid and Capoid) with separate origins. Based on such evidence as claiming Australoids had the largest, megadont teeth, this group was assessed by Coon as being the most archaic and therefore the most primitive and backward. Coon's methods and conclusions were later discredited and show either a "poor understanding of human cultural history and evolution or his use of ethnology for a racialist agenda."[9]
Terms associated with outdated notions of racial types, such as those ending in "-oid" have come to be seen as potentially offensive[10] and related to scientific racism.[9][11]
The inclusion of Indian tribes in the group was not well-defined, and was closely related to the question of the original peopling of India, and the possible shared ancestry between Indian, Andamanese, and Sahulian populations of the Upper Paleolithic.
The suggested Australo-Melanesian ancestry of the original South Asian populations has long remained an open question. It was embraced by Indian anthropologists as emphasising the deep antiquity of Indian prehistory. Australo-Melanesian hunter-gatherer and fisherman tribes of the interior of India were identified with the Nishada Kingdom described in the Mahabharata. Panchanan Mitra (1923) following Vincenzo Giuffrida-Ruggeri (1913) recognises a Pre-Dravidian Australo-Veddaic stratum in India.[13]
Alternatively, the Dravidians themselves have been claimed as originally of Australo-Melanesian stock,[14] a view held by Biraja Sankar Guha among others.[15]
Individuals with Australo-Melanesian phenotypes existed possibly also in East Asia (in and toward the south of East Asia) at least since Middle Paleolithic, but were largely displaced by migrations of Eastern Eurasianricefarmers since Neolithic, who may have spread from Central China to Southeastern Asia during Mesolithic and Neolithic and after adopting farming to the rest of Southeast Asia and Oceania.[17][18]
After discussing various criteria used in biology to define subspecies or races, Alan R. Templeton concludes in 2016: "[T]he answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no."[19]: 360 [20]
The Pan-Asian genome project concluded that Negrito populations in Malaysia and the Negrito populations in the Philippines were more closely related to non-Negrito local populations, rather than to each other, highlighting the non-existence of a distinct Australo-Melanesian grouping.[21]
References
^ abPullaiah, T; Krishnamurthy, KV; Bahadur, Bir (2017). Ethnobotany of India, Volume 5: The Indo-Gangetic Region and Central India. CRC Press. p. 26. ISBN9781351741316. names the tribes of Chota Nagpur, the Baiga, Gond, Bhil, Santal and Oroan tribes; counted as of partial Australoid and partial Mongoloid ancestry are certain Munda-speaking groups (Munda, Bonda, Gadaba, Santals) and certain Dravidian-speaking groups (Maria, Muria, Gond, Oroan).
^ abcAmerican Association of Physical Anthropologists (27 March 2019). "AAPA Statement on Race and Racism". American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
^J.R. Logan (ed.), The Journal of the Indian archipelago and eastern Asia (1859), p. 68.
^Black, Sue; Ferguson, Eilidh (2011). Forensic Anthropology: 2000 to 2010. Taylor and Francis Group. p. 127. ISBN9781439845899. Retrieved 3 July 2018. "There are considered to be four basic ancestry groups into which an individual can be placed by physical appearance, not accounting for admixture: the sub-Saharan African group ("Negroid"), the European group ("Caucasoid"), the Central Asian group ("Mongoloid"), and the Australasian group ("Australoid"). The rather outdated names of all but one of these groups were originally derived from geography"
^Sarat Chandra Roy (Ral Bahadur) (2000). Man in India - Volume 80. A. K. Bose. p. 59. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
^R. R. Bhattacharya et al. (eds., Anthropology of B.S. Guha: a centenary tribute (1996), p. 50.
^Mhaiske, Vinod M., Patil, Vinayak K., Narkhede, S. S., Forest Tribology And Anthropology (2016), p. 5. Bhuban Mohan Das, The Peoples of Assam (1987), p. 78.
