Today we take a look at anthropology in the 19th and very early 20th Centuries. Most of these will be of a type called anthropometric which was a term to describe the process of scientifically measuring various ethnic types around the world. We start with a man I believe was a 19th C. Australian Aboriginal. Unfortunately, I have no date or photographer for this photograph.
I learnt only recently that some of the Hunter Gatherer tribes of the Amazon have a unique DNA signature only found in some Australian Aboriginals, giving rise to enormous speculation as to the heretofore sacrosanct theories on human origins. (It also appears from new aerial photography techniques that entire cities - with pyramids - have been discovered beneath the Amazon canape, confirming the existence of the fabled El Dorado.) What is also fascinating is that Hunter Gatherer art, painted by shamans after imbibing the psychoactive potion called ayahuasca, has systematic similarities with Australian Aboriginal art. We now know as a fact that the Norsemen reached North America 500 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, we have Phoenician remains in the Eastern States of America, and Egyptian hieroglyphs on the delta of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. It now seems that the ancestors of the Australian Aboriginals, who are some of the world's oldest of peoples, found their way to South America.
ReplyDeleteI find all of this plausible. After all, I live in the most isolated inhabited place on the planet, and humans managed to get here over a millenium ago using oversized canoes.
DeleteA bit sketchy on the hieroglyphics.
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