ANTHROPOMETRY IN INDIA. 189 



conquerors. What were the elements and affinities of 

 that primitive population remained, however, very doubtful; 

 and the problem grew more complicated and difficult with 

 a more complete knowledge of the numerous hill, forest, 

 outcast, or servile tribes found not only in Southern and 

 Central India, but even in the far north and north-east. 

 It seemed doubtful whether these could really be the 

 survivals of the organised and powerful peoples who 

 were spoken of in the old Aryan literature as the hostile 

 occupants of Hindustan. A not unplausible idea, sup- 

 ported by the alleged presence of an outlying Dravidian 

 language among the Brahuis of Biluchistan, was that the 

 best parts of India had been conquered from the aborigines 

 long before the Aryan invasion by a Mongoloid or Turan- 

 ian people, of whom the Brahuis were the rear-guard. The 

 aborigines might have been of some other type, perhaps 

 akin to the Mincopies of Andaman, or of some other 

 negroid stem. But some observers found Mongoloid 

 features in .them too. Dr. Shortt, certainly the most 

 careful observer of the physical characteristics in the 

 last generation, reported of the Kurumbas, a very 

 degraded hill tribe in the Neilgherries, that they had 

 "heads short from end to end, with a lofty crown or 

 dome and prominent forehead, wedge-shaped faces, and 

 obtuse facial angles, hollow cheeks, and prominent molar 

 bones, the nose having a deep indentation at the root 

 about if inches in depth (!), which is general'. The 

 length of the nose from root to tip he found to be 175 

 inches, the breadth 1 '42 nearly ; from which we may 

 fairly conjecture that the Kurumbas are, if not platyrhine, 

 at least very nearly so. 



The value of these observations is impaired, for our 

 present purpose, by the doubt whether the Kurumbas are 

 not really a degenerate Dravidian tribe, once at a fair level 

 of civilisation, rather than an aboriginal clan ; but they are 

 very interesting in relation to the Australioid hypothesis, of 

 which more presently. 



Again, with regard to the Yenadis, another outcast 

 tribe of Madras, Shortt speaks of them as having a 



