Article

Anthropology

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Anthropology

Physical anthropology in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, as documented in the Society’s journal, was a discipline shaped by the convergence of colonial museum collections, European-trained osteologists, and the urgent question of the region’s deepest human past. The two principal studies preserved in the archival record—Gordon Harrower’s 1933 analysis of canoe-burial skeletons from Kuala Selinsing and W. L. H. Duckworth’s 1934 osteological survey of cave-dweller remains from Perak—illustrate how physical anthropology operated as both a classificatory enterprise and a contested interpretive field, in which skeletal measurements were pressed into service to resolve questions of racial affinity, cultural chronology, and the peopling of the archipelago [1, pp. 149–167], [2, pp. 190–210].

Scope and Historical Definition

The physical anthropology of the Malay Peninsula in the 1930s was defined by a narrow but consequential set of questions: who had inhabited the caves and riverine sites of the region before the arrival of the Malay and Indian populations, and what were the morphological affinities of those earlier inhabitants? Both Harrower and Duckworth worked within the classificatory frameworks of their period, employing terms such as “Negrito,” “Protomalayan,” “Dravidian,” “Australoid,” and “Pre-dravidian” to assign skeletal remains to putative racial categories [1, p. 150], [2, pp. 195–200]. These labels reflected the dominant typological tradition in which human variation was understood through discrete morphological types rather than through population-genetic or evolutionary models.

The material on which these judgements were based was characteristically fragmentary. Harrower received three groups of skeletal remains—designated Associations 1, 2, and 3—from I. H. N. Evans, Ethnographer at the Perak Museum, all of which were badly crushed, with the skulls requiring careful reconstruction from numerous pieces [2, pp. 190–191]. Duckworth’s collection from the caves of Gunong Sennyum, Lenggong, Gunong Pondok, and Bukit Chuping was similarly incomplete; the confusion of remains at Gunong Pondok was so complete as to make a final allocation of limb bones to crania almost impossible [1, p. 149]. In both cases, the osteologist’s task was to extract maximum information from degraded material and to place it within a comparative framework drawn from collections in Cambridge, Calcutta, and the Federated Malay States Museums.

The methodological core of the discipline at this period was craniometry and appendicular measurement. Harrower systematically compared linear measurements, cranial indices, orbital and nasal indices, and appendicular proportions against reference values for Malay, Semang, Dyak, Tamil, Javanese, Fukien, and Burmese skulls [2, pp. 195–198]. Duckworth employed tracings of cranial contours drawn with a dioptograph, comparative femoral series, and dental measurements to establish morphological affinities [1, pp. 150–151]. The comparative references were drawn from published measurements and from the Cambridge anthropological collection, which included Nicobarese, Australian, and New Caledonian material [1, p. 151].

Racial Attribution and the Negrito Question

The central interpretive problem in both studies was the racial attribution of the skeletal remains, and in both cases the answer pointed toward what was then termed the Negrito or Protomalayan element. Harrower’s Association 2 skull from Kuala Selinsing displayed a constellation of features—low vault, broad flattened nose, rectangular orbits, microcephalic capacity, dolichokerkic and dolichocnemic limb proportions, and pronounced platycnemism—that aligned it closely with the Semang type and decisively excluded it from the brachycephalic Malay or mesorhine Tamil categories [2, pp. 195–198]. The estimated cranial capacity of 1,236.5 ccms (via Manouvrier’s formula), a cephalic index of 76.98, and a nasal index of 66 (markedly platyrhine) placed the specimen in the microcephalic, mesaticephalic, platyrhine group most closely comparable to Schebesta’s Menri Semang skull, which had a capacity of 1,270 ccms and a cephalic index of 77.7 [2, pp. 195–198]. The Association 1 skull, at 190 mm in maximum length with a cephalic index of 75.0, was substantially larger but shared the same low-vaulted, square-faced, platyrhine morphology; Harrower classified it as a probable Semang–Dyak hybrid [2, pp. 198–200].

Duckworth’s conclusions, while reaching a similar broad identification, employed a different classificatory vocabulary. He rejected the Semang (and consequently the Andamanese and Philippine Negritos) on the ground that the cave-dwellers were markedly dolichocephalic whereas the Semang are brachycephalic [1, p. 149]. Instead, he assigned the Perak cave-dwellers to a group he identified as “Dravidian” or “Pre-dravidian,” linking them to the Veddas of Ceylon, the Nicobarese, the Palaiyans of southern India, the Wadjak of Java, and even Australian aborigines [1, pp. 149–151]. The Gunong Sennyum calvaria, with a cephalic index of 61 and a maximum calvarial width of 117 mm, represented the most extreme example of this dolichocephalic type [1, p. 153]. The Lenggong individual, estimated at approximately 5 ft. 2 in. stature, possessed a femur and humerus of remarkable slenderness closely resembling those of a Nicobarese islander in the Cambridge Collection [1, pp. 154–155].

The two studies thus arrived at convergent but differently articulated conclusions: Harrower identified a Negrito or Protomalayan origin, while Duckworth proposed a broader “Dravidian” or “Pre-dravidian” type extending from the Malay Peninsula to Australia [1, p. 151], [2, pp. 195–200]. The divergence was less a matter of empirical disagreement than of classificatory framework; both osteologists were working with the same general observation that the skeletal remains did not conform to the Malay or Indian types but pointed to an earlier, morphologically distinct population.

Morphological Detail and Pathological Observation

Beyond the broad question of racial attribution, both studies contributed detailed morphological and pathological observations that enriched the physical record of the region’s prehistoric populations. Harrower noted that the Association 2 tibiae showed pronounced platycnemism (indices 70.9 and 62.5), consistent with habitual squatting, and that the radio-humeral index of 81.7 placed the individual in the dolichokerkic group—a primitive trait shared with Fuegians, Andamanese, and simians [2, pp. 204–205]. The same individual displayed complete osseous sacralisation of the fifth lumbar vertebra, a prenatal condition in which the transverse processes fused to the sacral alae, along with chronic spondylitis affecting the lumbar vertebrae [2, p. 187, n. 5]. Extreme dental wear, with complete loss of enamel and exposure of ground-smooth dentine on all occlusal surfaces, was recorded in the Association 2 skull; Harrower observed a similar condition in a modern Hylam Chinese skull but could not attribute it to any identifiable dietary cause [2, pp. 186–187].

Duckworth’s observations on dental attrition were of a different character. The remarkably worn surface of the anterior teeth in the Gunong Pondok specimens was so extreme that he attributed it to artificial filing, a practice well known in south-east Asia, citing Koganei’s 1922 study of artificial dental deformation among Jōmon peoples [1, p. 160]. He also noted that the teeth were, with one exception, remarkably free from caries, and that the possibility that the attrition was artificial and borrowed from Malay tribes had been considered [1, p. 151]. The Bukit Chuping No. 1 skull presented an unusual combination: a small skull measuring 175 mm in glabello-occipital length and 128 mm in biparietal width (cephalic index 73.1) associated with femoral shafts estimating a maximum femoral length of 470 mm and a stature of approximately 1700 mm [1, pp. 158]. Duckworth acknowledged the apparent disproportion and considered three explanations—misattribution of the skull to the wrong skeleton, error in the femoral length estimate, or the genuine existence of such a combination among the cave-dwellers—before concluding that the association was tenable, noting that Kloss’s records included a Senoi Sakai of Sungkai measuring 1698 mm [1, pp. 164–165].

The Selinsing collection, examined by Duckworth, presented a different problem. The remains, representative of fifteen individuals, showed evidence of submarine deposition: in five instances barnacles or an oyster-shell were attached, and the fragmentary limb bones displayed definite signs of weathering by waves or tides [1, p. 166]. Duckworth concluded that the antiquity of the collection was limited, perhaps even to a matter of decades, a finding that complicated the site’s interpretation [1, p. 166]. He also noted that, contrary to Evans’s earlier characterisation of the crania as brachycephalic, only one of eight measurable specimens had a cephalic index over 80; one registered exactly 80, and the remainder fell below that figure [1, p. 167].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s journal documents a brief but intensive period of physical anthropological investigation in the Malay Peninsula, concentrated in the early 1930s and characterised by the collaboration between colonial museum staff and European-trained osteologists. The material was collected by Ivor Evans and P. V. van Stein Callenfels in the course of their archaeological and ethnological work for the Federated Malay States Museums, and was then submitted to specialists—Harrower at Singapore and Duckworth at Cambridge—for anatomical examination [1, p. 152], [2, pp. 190–191]. This division of labour, in which colonial administrators and museum curators provided the specimens and European specialists provided the interpretive framework, was typical of the period and shaped the character of the resulting scholarship.

The two studies addressed overlapping but distinct questions. Harrower’s work was driven by the tension between the skeletal evidence and the cultural assemblage from Kuala Selinsing, which included objects of clear Indian origin—a seal bearing a Pallava inscription, cornelian and agate beads—alongside items of probable Malayan or Bornean affinity [2, pp. 190–191]. His conclusion that the buried individuals were of Negrito or Protomalayan origin complicated the interpretation of the site, and Evans’s appended note proposed that Proto-Malayan sea-roving peoples may have conducted the bead trade across the Malay Archipelago under Indian influence, with Negritos present as dependants or through intermarriage [2, pp. 209–210]. Duckworth’s survey, by contrast, was a broader osteological comparison that sought to place the Perak cave-dwellers within a regional and even trans-regional framework, drawing on material from Ceylon, India, Java, Australia, and the Nicobar Islands [1, pp. 149–151].

The classificatory frameworks employed by both authors—racial typology, the use of terms such as “Dravidian,” “Australoid,” “Negrito,” and “Protomalayan,” and the assumption of discrete morphological types—reflect the dominant paradigms of 1930s physical anthropology and would not survive subsequent decades of population-genetic and post-colonial critique [1, p. 151], [2, pp. 195–200]. Nevertheless, the detailed measurements, comparative tracings, and pathological observations recorded in these studies constitute a permanent contribution to the physical record of the region’s prehistoric populations, and the questions they raised—about the identity of the earliest inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, the relationship between skeletal and cultural evidence, and the chronology of the sites they inhabited—remain central to the discipline.

Physical Anthropology

Social Anthropology

MBRAS Sources

Physical Anthropology

References

  1. W.L.H. Duckworth (1934). Human remains from rock-shelters and caves in Perak, Pahang and Perlis and from Selinsing JMBRAS 12(2): 149–167. Read on JSTOR
  2. Harrower G (1933). Skeletal remains from the Kuala Selinsing excavations, Perak, Malay Peninsula JMBRAS 11(2): 190–210.