The Tasmanians
Part 7: Origins, Genetics and outside
Relationships
The origin of the Tasmanians ever since the 17th century has been
widely speculated about, but no consensus was ever reached. It
remains a conundrum today.
Some thought and still think of them as distant relations of the
the Andamanese and other Negrito and/or of the the Papuans. Others
thought and still think of them as a more or less distant branch of
the mainland Australian aborigines or of the Papuans. Evidence for
these and other such speculation was never strong or conclusive and
it still is not.
Scientific progress in molecular genetics (DNA analysis) has only
recently advanced to the point where answers could be given with some
degree of confidence. Unfortunately, just as answers seem to be
within reach, the Palawa
group in Tasmania blocks this. Until their ban is lifted, nothing
much can be said about the likely affiliations of the ancient
Tasmanians.
For more related information, see also Part 8 "Archaeology
and the Oldest Tasmanians".
7.1. Who are the Tasmanians' closest
Relatives?
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How uncertain popular as well as scientific opinion was
(and still is) about the Tasmanians is reflected only too
clearly in the confused treatment the Encyclopaedia
Britannica of 1985 (15th edition, Micropedia vol. 11,
pp. 571-572) gave the subject:
On page 572 the Tasmanians were described as
"The original Tasmanians, now extinct, were a
Negrito people who numbered some 2,000 people at the time
of European settlement in the early 19th century. The
last full-blooded Tasmanian died in 1876 on Flinders
island where the people had been sent." (page 571)
On the very next page 572 of the same work they were
miraculously transmogrified into Australian aborigines:
"The Tasmanians were Aboriginal Australians, not
a separate or distinctive population, and were cut off
from the mainland area when a general rise in the sea
level flooded the Bass Strait about 10,000 years ago."
The Britannica editors in 1985 seem not to have
known which position to take, so they picked two from a wide
spectrum of scientific opinion - and published both.
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Since the Palawa
political pressure group in Tasmania does not allow DNA testing, only
craniometric methods are available. Most of these were made up to a
century ago but the measurements are valid even though they do not
approach the precision of contemporary molecular DNA analysis. Modern
craniometry can be done with laser beams to a very high level of
precision. It is a method by which skulls of several populations are
measured and results then then compared. The slight differences in
the shape of the skulls allow degrees of relationshipsbetween various
population groups to be established. The method is widely used in
palaeoanthropology (see our Brazilian chapter on thr Lapa Vermelha
find also known as "Luzia" where craniometriy has been extensively
used and with good results.
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The diagram shows the relationship of the Tasmanians to
other populations as established by craniometry (from W.W.
Howells. 1973. Cranial Variation in Man. Peabody
Museum, Harvard University).
The blue figures indicate the part of the world where the
names population lives orhas lived:
1. Australia
2. Papua-Newguinea
3.
Oceania
4.
America
5. East
Asia
6.India and Southeast
Asia
7. North Asia, Siberia,
Arctic
8. Western Asia, Middle
East
9.
Europe
10. Africa
Note that the Tasmanians are
craniometrically more closely related to the Tolai (living
on New Britain, off the east coast of Papua-Newguinea)) than
to the Austrralian aborigines.
For more detail see
http://arts.anu.edu.au/bullda/oz_craniometrics.html
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The caption in the original publication reads as follows:
Norma Frontalis illustrates several skull traits described
by the French writers. Parasagittal depressisons are
discernible between the keel and the parietal bosses. The
orbits are rectangular and low and the interorbital space is
wide. The maxillae are small in their vertical extent and
the apices of the maxillary incisors are in close relations
to the inferior margin of the wide, low nasal aperture. The
teeth are of large dimension in this specimen and
attritional wear is not apparent. The remaining eight skulls
of the collection possess much smaller teeth, but it is
understandable that the presence of such an exceptional case
of macrodontia as seen in this skull, occurring in a very
small series, could have abetted the original observation
and concept that the Tasmanians had 'enormous' teeth.
(from N.W.G. Macintosh and B.C.W. Barker, no date but
after 1961, The Osteology of Aboriginal Man in
Tasmania, The Oceanoa Monographies 12).
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Brian Plomley in his The Tasmanian Aborigines (1993, The
Plomley Foundation) wrote
During the last fifty years or so many of the skulls in
the various collections have been re-examined, more accurate
measurements made as well as new ones, in particular the so-called
epigenetic traits, that is, the characteristics of certain
foramina and processes which carry nerves and blood vessels or
have muscles attached to them. All this new research has produced
new information about the relationships between peoples. Of
greatest importance has been the elaboration of special
statistical methods for evaluating measurements of cranial size
and shape, the methods of multivariate analysis. These show that
the Tasmanian skull, in spite of its particular characters, is
closely related to that of the Australian Aboriginal, and the
latter in turn are related to Melanesians of New Britain and
elsewhere.
It is not known whether there were any regional differences in
cranial size and shape in the modern Tasmanian skull, but the
general structure of the population makes it unlikely and because
the number of Tasmanian skulls is small, about 87, and information
about the tribes to which the individuals belonged is uncertain in
most cases. The recent destruction of many Tasmanian skulls has
made difficult all research on its characters.
As well as study of cranial size and shape, there is some
suggestion that other parts of the skeleton show differences
between the Tasmanians and other peoples. Unfortunately, far too
little material has been available for study. It is possible that
the spinous processes of the vertebrae of the neck show such
differences. It can also be pointed out that the lower limbs form
a greater proportion of the total stature than in Europeans, just
as found in the Australian Aborigines.
There are other features of the human body which can provide
information about the relationships between peoples. The first of
these to be investigated thoroughly was the blood groups, and they
have provided a good deal of accurate information about certain
peoples, especially those geographically close to one another.
Some measurements have been carried out on Tasmanian mixed-bloods,
but the few blood types studied and the smallness of the sample
render the results meaningless.
A recent and very promising line of research has been the study
of the actual material of inheritance. This is a chemical
substance, deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA), of which four varieties
are involved. Assemblages of DNA form the genetic material, that
is, the genes, and the genes are joined together end to end in
long strings to form the chromosomes of the cell. Other nucleic
acids occur in other parts of the cell, for example, the
mitochondria, but the chromosomal DNA is of particular interest at
present.
Using complex chemical manipulations, genes and groups of genes
can be removed from their chromosomes for study, and comparisons
can be used to indicate the relationships between peoples. A
matter of considerable importance is that it has been possible to
recover chromosomal material from long dead tissue and in one of
the earliest investigations of this sort, material was extracted
from Egyptian mummies which enabled the sequence of the dynasties
to be established.
No doubt in the future many now unthought of methods of
studying the relationships between peoples will be elaborated,
providing even more accurate information about them.
... but not if the present-day descendants of ancient Tasmanians
persist in destroying the scientific evidence.
When first discovered, th Tasmanians looked not spectacularly
different from the inhabitants of mainland Australia, they were just
a little different. Like most (but not all) Australians, the
Tasmanians' hair and skin was darker than that of most Australians
and they had deep-set eyes overhung by brow ridges. Their noses were
broad and separated from their brow by a deep groove, their mouth was
wide and their lips full, heir cheekbones were prominent and their
overall body-build lean with tlong and slender limbs.
A major difference to the Australians was that the Tasmanians had
woolly rather than straight or wavy hair, in fact they had hair very
similar (but not identical to) the hair of Negritos and some Papuans
and Africans. DNA analysis could throw a great deal more light on the
matter and perhaps decide it one way or another - but this is blocked
by political considerations: neither the surviving mixed descendants
of the ancient Tasmanians nor the Australians want scientific results
to "separate them". It is not a questions of fact-finding, it is one
of politics.
The Tasmanians were adapted so well to their cold, wet and windy
climate that for this reason alone their residence on the island must
have lasted for a very long time and a genetic adaptation is likely.
Despite their cold climate, the traditional Tasmanians before the
arrival of whites went virtually naked, winter and summer. Tasmanian
women also dived deeply and frequently into thecold sea to collect
mussels, crayfish and other sea creatures from the sea bed (the
Tasmanian men, by contrast, seem to have been less happy to do so).
Diving into such cold waters is an unusual feat, but not quite as
much as it might appear at first sight. The Fuegian women and men at
the southern tip of South America (see Fuegians,
Fuegian Tribes
and Fuegian
archaeological sites in the American Chapter 54 of this site)
also dived for food in waters that were still colder than those of
southern Tasmania. Tasmania is located at "only" 43
degrees South while Tierra del Fuego is fully 7
degrees of latitude closer to Antarctica. Clearly, human adaptability
is greater than even optimists usually allow! As Carleton S. Coon has
pointed out (in his The Origins of Races, 1962, Alfred A.
Knopf, New York)
...It indicates that ill-clad human beings carrying fire
and the crudest of tools ... could have entered North America over
the Bering Strait at any time when the sea level was low enough to
permit passage [and even when it was not if they had some form
of boat - HJW]. At such times, with the flow of arctic water
cut off and the Japabnese current swinging along the southern
shoreline, the climate could have been no colder than it is in
modern Tierra del Fuego.
The ancient Tasmanians as an argument for the early populating of
the Americas!
Apart from the women's frequent diving in cold waters, Tasmanians
of either sex did not wear clothes on dry land, either. Mothers
sometimes wore a strip of kangaroo hide over one shoulder to carry an
infant but such would not have protected the naked infant from the
cold and rain. Some protection was provided by smearing animal fats,
ochre and/or charcoal over their bodies, but this seems to have been
done as much for ritual protection in the form of body-painting as
for protection against the elements.
Last change 1 February 2008