Persecution

Few years ago, I had a chance to talk with Mr. P., an Australian teaching English conversation at the NOVA language school. With my interest in aborigines, we had a lively conversation. And I shall never forget his words.

According to Mr. P., white colonists only thought of aborigines as a target of hunting, a wild beast in shape of a human being. This is how they saw the aborigines. In Gulliver's tales, there appear an intelligent horse that speaks the human language and Yahoo, a human shaped creature but with no trace of intelligence. This Yahoo is exactly what the Europeans had in mind about the aborigines.

Mr. P. continued: " A completely different type of human beings called Tasmanian aboriginals had once lived in Tasmania. But they all died out as victims of hunting by the white settlers. If there had been no annihilation, we were able to see humans of completely different type. What a pity! Can you imagine of a totally different human being?"

Needless to say, Tasmanians were not a different type of human beings. They are, in true sense, modern men. But it seems to be true that many Tasmanians became the victim of hunting by the whites.

Furthermore, those small number that survived then became the research subjects of anthropologists.

The one of the last survivor of Tasmanians, William Lanne, died in 1869. In spite of his wish to sleep in peace, three scientist groups stole his corpse from the morgue. The first group stole his head, the second his hands, legs and body that had been cut in pieces. By the time the last group arrived, only a small piece of his body was left.

To our surprise, Prof. Stockwell of the Tasmanian Royal Association frequently used a cigarette case made of Lanne's skin.

Tasmanians were known to be quite different from the modern aboriginals of Australia. But since they all died out, a precise link with modern aboriginals is not known.

As mentioned here, aborigines had experienced hardship throughout their history that resulted from the difference in appearance. And it is also true that there is also a distinctive anatomical feature that can't be seen in other races.

Aborigines are surely the key figures in considering the evolution of modern men. And how to interpret them has called for a long debate among the anthropologists.

Before we go into the mystery of aborigines, let's first take a brief look at recent research on human evolution.

Translated by Rie Ishida