The Australian Pygmies. (Letters).

SIR: I was very surprised to see the article by Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin called "The Extinction of the Australian Pygmies" (June 2002). Briefly, the authors insisted that the first occupants of Australia were not the Aboriginal people but Negritos ("little Negroes", that is, Pygmies), who survive essentially only in the Cairns rainforests, and that anthropologists, archaeologists and "activists" have been suppressing something that everybody else ought to know. I was dismayed at the article's disregard of scientific principles, at its selective approach to the evidence, and its general tone of conspiracy theory.

J.B. Birdsell proposed his trihybrid hypothesis (that Australia was populated by three successive waves of people, rather than by a single homogeneous Aboriginal population) in the 1930s, in an anthropological climate that assumed there had once been "pure races", that had mixed to form today's widely variable populations, rather than taking this variability at face value. Most versions of the "pure race" model, such as Coon's contention that Europeans consist of fifteen different "pure races" that had blended in different proportions in different parts of the continent, fell victim to Ockham's Razor and to the postwar blossoming of the science of genetics. The genetic study of Aboriginal Australian populations has lagged far behind that of Europeans, but the parsimony principle remains valid: don't multiply your basic postulates without adequate evidence. Windschuttle and Gillin flout this principle, and assume the trihybrid hypothesis to be correct until disproved, rather than the other way around.

An example of their selective use of evidence is their dismissal of craniology. It is not at all clear why they do this. Larnach and Macintosh's study, which they dismiss out of hand, demonstrated a gradient in skull characters up the east coast of mainland Australia, from the Sydney region to Cape York, and the Cairns rainforest skulls fitted exactly where geography predicted that they should. Not mentioned is an enormous craniometric study by W.W. Howells, published in several instalments between 1973 and 1995, which included various Aboriginal, Melanesian and Negrito samples; the Negritos (Andaman Islanders and Aeta from the Philippines) fell well away from both Australians and Melanesians, and incidentally from each other, strongly suggesting that Negritos are populations that have independently adapted to rainforest environments.

They note that Birdsell maintained his trihybrid hypothesis right up to his last book, in 1993. True; but throughout the book he mounted no elaborate argument, rather he assumed it. In his vast (and valuable) array of tables and maps of characters, we find that the Cairns rainforest people are extreme among Australian populations in only a few: small size, high frequency of tightly curled hair, and some features correlated with their small body size, especially small eyebrow ridges. In each table, Birdsell gives extra-Australian standards, and we can see that the Cairns rainforest people have (on average) small brow ridges by Australian standards, but nonetheless large ones by world standards. Andaman Islanders, on the other hand, have (again on average) arguably the world's smallest brow ridges.

As I have mentioned, the alternative hypothesis to Birdsell's is that the "Negrito" features of the Cairns people are adaptations to their rainforest environment. Windschuttle and Gillin consider this refuted because "The Aborigines of the equally dense Daintree rainforest ... are not especially short in stature". In fact, no data exist for the Daintree ...