MOUSTERIAN MAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 244, 15 October 1925, Page 6

MOUSTERIAN MAN.

POLYNESIAN RACES. I JEWISH A PERFECT GREEK FACE. ; (From Our Own Correspondent.) j LONDON, September 8. "No race had been more misunderstood than the Polynesian," was the arresting I statement made by Dr. W. P. Pycraft, assistant keeper of the zoological department of the British Museum, In the anthropological section of the British Association. . His view of Mousterian or modern man as given in his lecture yesterday was that it is necessary to recognise several species of sub-species. It was a dreadful thing to say, but their conception, as anthropologists, of "races" and "species, and "somatologieal units" was in a state of "mush." There was not one of the schemes of the classification of man published by British, Continental and American anthropologists which would stand the test of criticism, because they had all been built up of materials which could not possibly hang together. No race has been more misunderstood than the Polynesian, although it was one of the most characteristic of all. Human skulls from New Guinea, Oregon and California bore a wonderful likeness to skulls from Buenos Ayres, La Tigra and Arkansas, and the inference seemed unavoidable that the Polynesian was a migrant from America. From their antiquity it was extremely improbable that these fossil men had means of making so tremendous a voyage as that from the, Pacific into America, and it was much more likely that later descendants of these people, who enjoyed a wide range in America, migrated into the Pacific. Jf this interpretation found acceptance, a matter which had long troubled them would be cleared up. The suggestion that the Polynesian originated in America could not lightly be dismissed. Condemning the efforts to arrive at a classification of man based on the results of "average indices," Dr. Pycraft said they must throw old traditions to the winds and adopt the methods of the zoologists. By their means only would they be able to trace out the affinities and descent of the various types of man which they all professed to be striving to discover. That the perfect Greek type of face was to be found to-day among people of Jewish blood, was the contention of Mr. K. N. Salaman, in discussing inheritance of facial types, in another of the anthropological lectures. If they were to seek for examples of the type with the straight line of forehead and nose, they would find them in Jewish schools, preferably in the East End of London, where out of 500 children they could find 12 perfect classic types. There were three facial types of Jews —the Armenoir, the popularly accepted Jewish type, with round head, hooked nose and small mouth; the Semitic, with long face and head, long straight nose, big mouth and thick lips, and the pseudo-Nordic, with email features, nose and brow often in continuous line, and well-developed chin. When a Jewess mated with an Englishman, German, or any of the Nordic races, the Nordic characteristics generally overcame the Jewish strain. Mr. Salaman showed photographs of well-known Jews and their families, including Mr. Israel Zangwill, to illustrate the dominance of the Nordic type.