Half -Light over Warm Seas 109 



These people were midden-makers, shore-dwellers, and whale- 

 chasers. But who were they? 



The Ainus called them "Koro-pok-guru," or dwarfs, and later the 

 Japanese called them "Tsuchi-Gumo," which means "earth spiders," 

 because they were small of stature and lived in caves. Both the 

 Ainus and the Japanese seem to have treated them abominably and 

 to have deliberately set out to exterminate them. They appear orig- 

 inally to have inhabited the whole archipelago, and they seem to 

 have been related to the indigenes of Kamchatka, to the Koryaks, 

 and to the Chukchis of far northeast Asia. Perhaps they were co- 

 ancestors of the Eskimos also, for they seem to have lived an exist- 

 ence that is typical of those people prior to the impact of modern 

 civilization upon their culture. They lived in "igloos" of stone, earth, 

 and possibly also of whales' bones rather than of ice, but they built 

 skin boats, harpooned marine animals, were small of stature, sturdy, 

 and copperish in color, and they were expert engravers of bone 

 and ivory. They appear to have been Mongoloid rather than Cauca- 

 sian, but they were very definitely "modern men" as opposed to 

 submen. 



The arrival of the Ainus on the far eastern coast of Asia wrought 

 a great change. Being continentals, and therefore landsmen, they 

 did not comprehend seamanship or the pursuit of the whale. They 

 apparently had primitive boats, but they did not venture upon the 

 sea. Nonetheless, they appear to have derived sea products from 

 somewhere, and we can only suppose that these came from the de- 

 spised Koro-pok-guru, some of whom they had left alone to follow 

 their aqueous pursuits along the shores. Then, many hundreds and 

 possibly thousands of years later, came the Japanese. The origin of 

 these people is shrouded in mythological history but is from a purely 

 anthropological point of view somewhat clearer. 



The Mongoloid stock is separable into two major parts; on the one 

 hand a northern group of continentals; on the other a southeastern 

 aggregate. The latter, although mixed with all manner of aboriginal 

 peoples and with a certain am.ount of immigrant Caucasic blood, are 

 quite distinct, and include the inhabitants of Indonesia and the Phil- 

 ippines (other than those with Spanish blood, of course), the Indo- 

 Chinese of all kinds, the Thais, and others. These peoples suddenly 

 erupted, starting about 1000 b.c, and spread both southeast and 



