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In physical anthropology, forensic anthropology and archaeogenetics, Australo-Melanesians (also Australasian, Australomelanesoid or Australoid) form a large group of populations indigenous to Maritime Southeast Asia and Oceania.

The group includes Papuans, Aboriginal Australians, Melanesians (mainly from Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu) and the populations grouped as "Negrito" (the Andamanese, the Semang and Batek peoples, the Maniq people, the Aeta people, the Ati people, and various other ethnic groups in the Philippines).

The Vedda people in Sri Lanka and a number of dark-skinned tribal populations in the interior of the Indian subcontinent (mainly Dravidian-speaking groups especially some Tamil communities and some Austroasiatic-speaking peoples, like the Munda people) are also suggested to belong to the Australoid group, but there are controversies about this inclusion. A research involving cranial morphology, made by Indian anthropologists, however, suggests that the South Asian Indian populations have different cranial characteristics from Australoid groups. This difference has possibly been strengthened in recent times due to intermarriage with peoples of different origins. A genetic study in 1985 suggested connections between tribal peoples of Southern India and Sri Lanka and Negrito populations of the Philippines and Malaysia. Nevertheless, a more recent study sustains that the Southern Indian populations are not closely related to the classic Australo-Melanesian groups.

The term "Australioid race" was introduced by Thomas Huxley in 1870 to refer to certain peoples indigenous to South and Southeast Asia and Oceania. Terms associated with outdated notions of racial types, such as those ending in "-oid" have come to be seen as potentially offensive and related to scientific racism.

Terminological history

The term "Australoid" was coined in ethnology in the mid 19th century, describing tribes or populations "of the type of native Australians". In physical anthropology, Australoid is used for morphological features characteristic of Aboriginal Australians by Daniel John Cunningham in his Text-book of Anatomy (1902).

An Australioid (sic, with an additional -i-) racial group was first proposed by Thomas Huxley in an essay On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind (1870), in which he divided humanity into four principal groups (Xanthochroic, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australioid). Huxley's original model included the native inhabitants of South Asia under the Australoid category. Huxley further classified the Melanochroi (Peoples of the Mediterranean race) as a mixture of the Xanthochroi (northern Europeans) and Australioids. Huxley (1870) described Australioids as dolichocephalic; their hair as usually silky, black and wavy or curly, with large, heavy jaws and prognathism, with skin the color of chocolate and irises which are dark brown or black.

The term "Proto-Australoid" was used by Roland Burrage Dixon in his Racial History of Man (1923). In a 1962 publication, Australoid was described as one of the five major human races alongside Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Congoid and Capoid.

In The Origin of Races (1962), Carleton Coon attempted to refine such scientific racism by introducing a system of five races with separate origins. Based on such evidence as claiming Australoids had the largest, megadont teeth, this group was assessed by Coon as being the most archaic and therefore the most primitive and backward. Coon's methods and conclusions were later discredited and show either a "poor understanding of human cultural history and evolution or his use of ethnology for a racialist agenda."

Bellwood (1985) uses the terms "Australoid", "Australomelanesoid" and "Australo-Melanesians" to describe the genetic heritage of "the Southern Mongoloid populations of Indonesia and Malaysia".

Since the 1980s, anthropological terms in "-oid" have come to be avoided in some disciplines, especially in the United States, where the term Australo-Melanesian is now preferred. In other areas, specifically in anthropological literature in India, the term Australoid continues to be preferred.

Distribution

Besides the Papuans, Australian Aboriginals, Melanesians, and Negritos, the "Australoid" category is often taken to include various tribes of India. The inclusion of Indian tribes in the group is not well-defined, and is closely related to the question of the original peopling of India, and the possible shared ancestry between Indian and Australian populations of the Upper Paleolithic. The American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1996, p. 382) by American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza in their text, The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994, P. 241) all use the term.

Tee suggested Australoid ancestry of the original South Asian populations has long remained an open question. It was embraced by Indian anthropologists as emphasizing the deep antiquity of Indian prehistory. Australoid hunter-gatherer and fisherman tribes of the interior of India were identified with the Nishada Kingdom described in the Mahabharata. Panchanan Mitra (1923) following Vincenzo Giuffrida-Ruggeri (1913) recognizes a Pre-Dravidian Australo-Veddaic stratum in India. Alternatively, the Dravidians themselves have been claimed as originally of Australoid stock, a view held by Biraja Sankar Guha among others.

South Indian tribes specifically described as having Australoid affinities include the Oraon, Munda, Santal, Bhil, Gondi, the Kadars of Kerala, the Kurumba and Irula of the Nilgiris, the Paniyans of Malabar, the Uralis, Kannikars, Mithuvan and Chenchus. but other Indian anthropologists of the post-colonial period, such as S. P. Sharma (1971) and D. N. Majumdar (1946, 1965), have gone as far as claiming Australoid ancestry, to a greater or lesser extent, for almost all the castes and tribes of India. Newer Indian anthropology studies about cranial morphology do not support an Australoid ancestry in South Asian populations.

Physical features

In physical anthropology, the Australo-Melanesian group is characterized primarily by its characteristic dental morphology. In Java, "Australo-Melanesian dentitions" are found in fossils until the mid-Holocene (c. 5,000 years ago), but are replaced by modern "Southern Mongoloid dentitions" (Sundadonty) in the Neolithic, suggesting the displacement of the aboriginal Australo-Melanesian population by the Austronesian expansion.

Genetics

Numerous studies of archaeogenetics performed during 2009–2016 have suggested that Eurasian populations can be derived from an early division of the non-African lineage into an eastern and a western clade lineage before around 40,000 years ago. It has been argued, however, that this model of a primary split between eastern and western Eurasians is invalid for Oceania and Southeast Asia. The so-called "southern-route hypothesis" derives an Australasian lineage, comprising Australians, New Guineans, and possibly Southeast Asian Negritos, from an early out-of-Africa dispersal, forming an ancestral lineage which split off the other non-African lineages prior to the Eastern Eurasian vs. Western Eurasian split. A number of 2016 studies have presented a refined model of Australasian ancestry. Reviewing the evidence, Lipson and Reich (2017) present as best-fitting model a derivation of the Australasian clade from the Eastern Eurasian clade at an early time, with substantial Denisovan admixture (of the order of 4%) before the Australasian clade split into the Australian and the New Guinean lineages.

Pugach et al. (2013) find an ancestral association between Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans and the Mamanwa Negritos, with an estimated divergence time of at least 35,000 years, in support of the "southern migration route" scenario. In addition, the study finds evidence of gene flow between India and Australia at a later time, an estimated 141 generations ago (i.e. roughly 3,000 to 4,000 years ago), suggesting a possible late migration wave to Australia.

For Australo-Melanesian populations within Austronesia (the Negritos, Papuans, and Orang Asli), they underwent fairly extensive population admixture with the incoming Austronesian migrants.

A 2006 CFSL research article which assessed "3522 individuals belonging to 54 (23 belonging to the Austroasiatic, 18 to Dravidian, 7 to Tibeto-Burman and 24 to Indo-European linguistic groups) endogamous Indian populations, representing all major ethnic, linguistic and geographic groups" for genetic variations to support such classifications found no conclusive evidence. It further summed that "the absence of genetic markers to support the general clustering of population groups based on ethnic, linguistic, geographic or socio-cultural affiliations" undermines the broad groupings based on such affiliations that exist in population genetic studies and forensic databases.

Another study (Rosenbert et al., 2005), analysing the whole genome of worldwide populations, grouped the South Asians as own distinct group. The study results suggest that there are 5 major human groups:

• Subsaharan-African (Negroid)
• West-Eurasian (Caucasoid)
• South-Asian ("Dravidoid")
• East-Asian (Mongoloid)
• Melanesian (Australoid)

Possible early presence in the Americas

A speculative theory of Walter Neves in the 1990s proposes that an early Australoid population may have been the earliest occupants of the New World. The theory was based on an analysis of the Luzia Woman fossil found in Brazil, and found tentative academic support.

If this hypothesis is correct, it would mean that some Australoid groups continued the Great Coastal Migration beyond Southeast Asia, along the continental shelf north in East Asia and across the Bering land bridge, reaching the Americas by about 50,000 years ago.

Genetic evidence

In 2015, two major studies of the DNA of living and ancient people detect in modern Native Americans a trace of DNA related to that of native people from Australia and Melanesia. Australasian admixture in some living Native Americans, including those of the Aleutian Islands and the Surui people of Amazonian Brazil. Evidence of Australasian admixture in Amazonian populations was found by Skoglund and Reich (2016).

Walter Neves and Mark Hubbe argue that these people descended from an early wave of migration that was separate from the one that gave rise to today’s Native Americans, and drew on a different source population in Asia.

Morphology

Christy Turner notes that "cranial analyses of some South American crania have suggested that there might have been some early migration of "Australoids." However, Turner argues that cranial morphology suggests sinodonty in all the populations he has studied.

One of the earliest skulls discovered in the Americas by archaeologists is an Upper Paleolithic specimen named the Luzia Woman. According to Neves, Luzia's Paleo-Indian predecessors lived in South East Asia for tens of thousands of years, after migrating from Africa, and began arriving in the New World, as early as 15,000 years ago. Some anthropologists have hypothesized that Paleo-Indians migrated along the coast of East Asia and Beringia in small watercraft, before or during the LGM. Neves' conclusions have been challenged researchers who argued that the cranio-facial variability could just be due to genetic drift and other factors affecting cranio-facial plasticity in Native Americans.

In November 2018, scientists of the University of São Paulo and Harvard University released a study that contradicts the alleged Australo-Melanesian physical appearance of Luzia. Using DNA sequencing, the results showed that Luzia had Mongoloid features. The bust of Luzia displaying African features was done in the 1990's. "However, skull shape isn't a reliable marker of ancestrality or geographic origin. Genetics is the best basis for this type of inference," Strauss explained."The genetic results of the new study show categorically that there was no significant connection between the Lagoa Santa people and groups from Africa or Australia. So the hypothesis that Luzia's people derived from a migratory wave prior to the ancestors of today's Amerindians has been disproved. On the contrary, the DNA shows that Luzia's people were entirely Amerindian."

See also

• Melanesians
• Negrito
• Andamanese
• Aboriginal Australians
• Ancestral South Indians
• Mediterranean race
• Papuans

References

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• Indigenous peoples of Oceania
• Indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia
• Indigenous peoples of South Asia
• Historical definitions of race
• Biological anthropology