New Theory of Australian Tribes Disclosed by Birdsell at Museum

A new theory about the original peopling of Australia, in conflict with the general belief that the Australian aboriginal bushmen represent a single homogeneous race, was reported last night in a lecture here, by Joseph B. Birdsell, physical anthropologist of the Peabody Museum of Anthropology.

Birdsell reported evidence that the natives represent a mixture of three racial strains which arrived on the continent at different periods of pre-history.

His lecture was a preliminary report on one of the most extensive anthropological surveys ever conducted in Australia, carried out by Harvard and the University of Adelaide, Australia, under the sponsorship of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Birdsell and Norman B. Tindale, Ethnologist of the South Australia Museum and the University of Adelaide, were in the field more than a year in 1938-39, and made physical measurements of some 2,500 Australian natives and half castes from about a hundred different tribal groups in the East, South and West. They traveled some 20,000 miles in the expedition, mostly by truck.

First inhabitants of Australia, Birdsell said, appear to have been a pigmy people, some 20,000 years ago. Later comers, according to the theory, were a primitive, hairy, white strain from south-eastern Asia, related to the hairy Ainu, of Japan; and a third, dark-skinned people, with thick brow ridges, bearing a relationship to certain peoples found in India, and Ceylon.

The evidence for the existence of pigmoid peoples in the Australian mainland is the first obtained by scientists. Birdsell and Tindale found that the traces of the pigmy element in the Australian native peoples are strongest new in the Cairns table-land region on the northeastern coast, in Queensland. It is probably that at their first coming, the pigmy people occupied the whole continent, and have since mixed with, and been anthropologically submerged by the later comers.

The hairy, light-skinned people that are believed to have followed the pigmies in the second mass migration onto Australia, have left the strongest traces today in the southeastern and western coast. The third, dark-skinned group has left strongest traces in the north coastal region.

Hybrid mixtures of natives and whites in Australia were a principal object of study by the expedition.

Birdsell and Tindale found that in the first generation Australian hybrids nearly all traces of native parentage vanish. Dark skin, flat noses and heavy brow ridges disappear, and the hybrids possess clear-cut white features.

Further, it was found, the first generation, hybrids are physically energetic, adapting themselves easily to the whites' economic life.