Southeast Asia woman of the Philippines
Negritos in
Southeast Asia (including the
Batak and
Aeta of the Philippines, the
Andamanese of the
Andaman Islands, and the
Semang of the
Malay Peninsula) are sometimes called pygmies (especially in older literature). Negritos share some common physical features with African pygmy populations, including short stature and
dark skin. The name "Negrito", from the
Spanish adjective meaning "small black person", was given by early explorers. The explorers who named the Negritos assumed the Andamanese they encountered were from Africa. This belief was, however, discarded by anthropologists who noted that apart from dark skin, peppercorn hair, and
steatopygia, the Andamanese had little in common with any African population, including the African pygmies. Their superficial resemblance to some Africans and
Melanesians is thought to be from living in a similar environment, or simply retentions of the initial human form. and have been shown to have separated early from Asians, suggesting that they are either surviving descendants of settlers from the early
out-of-Africa migration of the
Great Coastal Migration of the
Proto-Australoids, or that they are descendants of one of the founder populations of modern humans.
Frank Kingdon-Ward in the early 20th century reported a tribe of pygmy
Tibeto-Burman speakers known as the
Taron inhabiting the remote region of Mt.
Hkakabo Razi in Southeast Asia on the border of China (
Yunnan and
Tibet), Burma, and India. A Burmese survey done in the 1960s reported a mean height of an adult male Taron at and that of females at . These are the only known "pygmies" of clearly
East Asian descent. The cause of their diminutive size is unknown, but diet and
endogamous marriage practices have been cited. The population of Taron pygmies has been steadily shrinking and is now down to only a few individuals. In 2013, a link between the Taron and the
Derung people in
Yunnan, China, was uncovered by Richard D. Fisher, which may indicate the presence of pygmy populations among the Derung tribe.
Disputed presence in Australia Australian anthropologist
Norman Tindale and American anthropologist
Joseph Birdsell suggested there were 12 Negrito-like tribes of short-statured
Aboriginal peoples living on the coastal and rainforest areas around
Cairns on the lands of the
Mbabaram people and
Djabugay people. Birdsell found that the average adult male height of Aboriginal people in this region was significantly less than that of other Aboriginal Australian groups; however, it was still greater than the maximum height for classification as a pygmy people, so the term
pygmy may be considered a misnomer. He called this short-statured group
Barrineans, after
Lake Barrine. Birdsell classified Aboriginal Australians into three major groups, mixed together to varying degrees: the Carpentarians, best represented in
Arnhem Land; the Murrayans, centred in southeastern Australia; and the Barrineans. He argued that people related to Oceanic Negritos were the first arrivals, and had been absorbed or replaced over time by later incoming peoples; the present-day Barrineans retained the greatest proportion of ancestry from this original Negrito group, "[b]ut this is not to say that the Barrineans are Negritos ... the Negritic component is clearly subordinate, and ... the preponderant element is Murrayian." This trihybrid model is generally considered defunct today; craniometric, genetic, and linguistic evidence does not support a separate origin of Barrinean or other Aboriginal groups, and physical differences between Aboriginal groups can be explained by adaptation to differing environments. In 2002, the purported existence of short-statured people in Queensland was brought into the public eye by
Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin in an article published by the
right-wing Quadrant magazine (edited by Windschuttle himself). The authors argued that these people were evidence for a distinct Negrito population in support of Birdsell's theory, and claimed that "the fact that the Australian pygmies have been so thoroughly expunged from public memory suggests an indecent concurrence between scholarly and political interests", because evidence of descent from earlier or later waves of origin could lead to conflicting claims of priority by Aboriginal people and hence pose a threat to political co-operation among them. This and other publications promoting the trihybrid model drew several responses, which went over the current scientific evidence against the theory, and suggested that attempts to revive the theory were motivated by an agenda of undermining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander claims to
native title. Some Aboriginal
oral histories and
oral traditions from Queensland tell of "little red men". In 1957 a member of the Jinibara (the
Dalla people) tribe of SE Queensland, Gaiarbau, who was born in 1873 and had lived for many years traditionally with his tribe, said that he knew of the "existence of these "little people – the Dinderi", also known as "Dimbilum", "Danagalalangur" and "Kandju". Gaiarbau claims he saw members of a "tribe of small people ... and said they were like dwarfs ... and ... not ... any of them stood five feet [1.5m]." The Dinderi are also recorded in other stories, such as one concerning a
platypus myth and another,
The Dinderi and Gujum - The Legend of the Stones of the Mary River. Susan McIntyre-Tamwoy, archaeologist and adjunct professor at
James Cook University, has written of the northern
Cape York Aboriginal people's belief of the
bipotaim, which is when "the landscape as we know it today was created".
Bipotaim was formed "before people, although not perhaps before the short people or the red devils as these were also here before people". She writes, "many ethnographers recorded stories of 'short people' or what they referred to as 'pygmy tribes, such as
Lindsey Page Winterbotham. McIntyre-Tamwoy recounts a
bipotaim story: "We are the short people [pygmies?]. Red devils occupy parts of the adjacent stony coast but our home is here in the sand dunes and forest. Before the Marakai ['white people'] came to our land the people were plentiful and they roamed the land. They understood the land and called out in the language of the country to seek permission, as they should ...". According to Nathan Sentance, a librarian from the indigenous Wiradjuri nation employed by the Australian National Museum, there is no known archaeological or biological evidence such a people existed. Sentance claims it is a myth used to justify the
colonisation of Australia as well as other countries by Europeans.
Micronesia and Melanesia Norman Gabel mentions that rumours exist of pygmy people in the interior mountains of
Viti Levu in
Fiji, but explains he had no evidence of their existence as of 2012.
E. W. Gifford reiterated Gabel's statement in 2014 and claims that tribes of pygmies in the closest proximity to Fiji would most likely be found in Vanuatu. During the 1900s, when
Vanuatu was known as
New Hebrides, sizable pygmy tribes were first reported throughout northeastern
Santo. It is likely that they are not limited to this region of New Hebrides. Nonetheless, there is no anthropological evidence linking pygmies to other islands of Vanuatu. == Archaic humans ==