538 THE CHANGING GENERATIONS 



We have already discussed the Bushmen and Australoids, including the 

 possibility that both may be remnants of ancient major stocks. The 

 Bushmen cannot be traced; but the Australoids surely came from Asia. 

 It is uncertain when they reached Australia; but if they used boats, as 

 seems likely, it could not have been much more than 10,000 years ago. 



The distribution of the Negroids is the hardest to account for. Both 

 the Negroes and the Negritos show similarly discontinuous distribution 

 on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean. By all zoogeographic analogy 

 we should look for their origin in adjacent but separate parts of southern 

 Asia. It is quite impossible to suppose that they independently found 

 their way from the Congo to Melanesia, or vice versa. An Asiatic origin 

 for the Negritos is not hard to accept, for some of them still survive in 

 the Malay Peninsula, and they have left traces in the populations of 

 Ceylon and southern India. But — and this is a serious objection — there is 

 nothing at all to show that Negroes were ever anywhere in Asia. Boyd, 

 on the basis of blood-group genes, tries to avoid this dilemma by saying 

 that the Melanesians are not really Negroes at all, but only look like 

 Negroes; no other anthropologist apparently holds this view. 



Both Negroes and Negritos used boats to get to the islands where we 

 find them. This is certain, for the Negritos were the only people to reach 

 the Andamans, far out in the Indian Ocean, and the Negroes have Neo- 

 lithic cultures, which included knowledge of boats. We also know that 

 the Negritos went first, for everywhere they are enclosed by more ad- 

 vanced peoples, who in Melanesia and Africa are Negroes. So much is 

 clear, but nothing else. How did Negritos in the first place, and later on 

 Negroes, reach the Congo Basin in West Africa, when the whole eastern 

 part of Africa fronting the Indian Ocean was held by Mediterraneans 

 and Bushmen? If the Grimaldi Negroids are really Negroids, how did 

 they come to be in Europe during the fourth glacial age? And if the 

 Negroes really came from southern Asia, why have they left no trace of 

 their presence? 



As yet there are no answers to these questions. Howells suggests that 

 the mystery of the Polynesians may furnish a clue to the last, however. 

 The Polynesians migrated by boat to the Pacific in fairly recent times. 

 We are quite sure they came from Indonesia, and yet they left no traces 

 behind them, either. Did the Negroes, like the Polynesians, sail away 

 en masse from their Asiatic homeland at a still earlier date? And while 

 some went east to Melanesia, did others follow the African coast around 

 the Horn and northward to the mouth of the Congo? If so, they had been 

 preceded by the Negritos. If this hypothesis seems improbable, as it 

 does, no one has yet suggested one more likely. The Negroes and Negritos 

 remain the greatest of all the racial enigmas. 



