40 ANTHROPOLOGY IN WESTERN HEMISPHERE AND PACIFIC ISLANDS. 



Hawaiian Islands. In Mangareva, where the art of canoe-craft has been lost, 

 there is an abundance of timber in the mountains, and a protecting reef 

 gives advantages of a quiet harbor which should have developed navigation. 

 Such conditions offer opportunities to shed light on the problems of ethnic 

 psychology. 



MEUNESIA, 



Melanesia includes New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, Admiralty 

 Islands, Louisade Archipelago, Solomon, Santa Cruz, New Hebrides, Loyalty 

 Islands, New Caledonia, and Fiji. This group of islands takes its name from 

 its dark-skinned inhabitants, the Melanesians. The people living in New 

 Guinea are also called Papuans, a Malay word meaning frizzly-haired. Some 

 authorities make a distinction between the Papuans and the inhabitants of 

 the rest of Melanesia. As a collective name Keane suggests "Papuasians." 



The Melanesians are dark, often black in skin color, with thick lips and 

 woolly hair. They greatly resemble certain African Negroes. 



Practically no large Melanesian problems have yet been solved. The 

 fundamental question "Who are the Melanesians?" remains unanswered. 

 Are the people an easterly migrating branch of African Negroes? Or are 

 the latter a westwardly migrating branch of the Melanesians? Are they 

 both remnants of a much more extensive group of black men which occupied 

 Africa, Melanesia, and intervening areas? Or are the Melanesians an indige- 

 nous group with skin and hair similar to the Africans, yet a group independ- 

 ently evolved? Are they greatly like the Africans, or would a scientific study 

 prove the two only superficially similar? 



Keane regards all of Oceania as the original range of the Melanesians 

 now restricted by the intrusion of the Polynesians. Some conceive New 

 Guinea as the possible center of Melanesian dispersion. It seems fairlj' well 

 agreed that the Melanesians were the earliest inhabitants of the region they 

 now occupy. However, is it not possible that the Melanesians are an amal- 

 gamated product of some (at present unidentified) peoples with the existing 

 primitive Negrito, the small, frizzly-haired man found in the Philippines and 

 believed to be the aboriginal inhabitant there, and who lives also in New 

 Guinea, Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and the nearby Andaman Islands? 



The typical physical, temperamental, and cultural characteristics of 

 the Melanesians must be compared with those of other groups in an effort 

 to solve the now open problem of this fiercest and most savage of all 

 Oceanic peoples. 



One of the most important large cultural problems which study of the 

 Melanesians may assist in solving is that of cannibalism. Were aU men 

 cannibals in the early natural exploitation stage of their development, eating 

 the people they killed as they ate other animals? Ward thinks so. Or was 

 cannibalism largely a local matter due to other conditions, such as absence 

 of large food-animals? 



