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In anthropology, pygmy peoples are whose average height is unusually short. The term pygmyism is used to describe the phenotype of endemic short stature (as opposed to disproportionate dwarfism occurring in isolated cases in a population) for populations in which adult men are on average less than tall.
Although the term is sometimes considered derogatory because it focuses on a physical trait,The American Heritage Dictionary says that the term "strikes many as inherently derogatory" because "many people consider it offensive to refer to others by a name that identifies them in terms of a physical trait". it remains the primary term associated with the African Pygmies, the of the Congo Basin (comprising the Bambenga, Bambuti and Batwa). The terms "Asiatic pygmies" and "Oceanic pygmies" have also been used to describe the Negrito populations of Southeast Asia and Australo-Melanesian peoples of short stature. The Taron people of Myanmar are an exceptional case of a pygmy population of Mongoloid phenotype.
In Greek mythology and classical natural history, the word denoted a tribe of diminutive people first described by the ancient Greek poet Homer, and reputed to live to the south of modern-day Ethiopia or in India. For example, Aristotle described them thus in his History of Animals (while discussing cranes that migrate south of Egypt): "The story is not fabulous, but there is in reality a race of dwarfish men, and the horses are little in proportion, and the men live in caves underground."Aristotle, History of Animals 8.12, 892a12. Translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.
Many African pygmies prefer to be identified by their ethnicity, such as the Aka people (Mbenga), Baka, Mbuti, and Twa. The term Bayaka, the plural form of the Aka/Yaka, is sometimes used in the Central African Republic to refer to all local pygmies. Likewise, the Kongo language word Bambenga is used in Congo Basin. In other parts of Africa, they are called Wochua or Achua. In French-speaking Africa, they are sometimes referred to adjectivally as autochthon ( autochtone), meaning "native" or "indigenous".
Other explanations include lack of food in the rainforest environment, low calcium levels in the soil, the need to move through dense jungle, adaptation to heat and humidity, and as an association with rapid reproductive maturation under conditions of early mortality. Other evidence points towards unusually low levels of expression of the genes encoding the growth hormone receptor and growth hormone compared to the related tribal groups, associated with low serum levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 and short stature.
Some 30% of Aka language is not Bantu, and a similar percentage of Baka language is not Ubangian. Much of pygmy vocabulary is botanical, dealing with honey collecting, or is otherwise specialized for the forest and is shared between the two western pygmy groups. It has been proposed that this is the remnant of an independent western pygmy (Mbenga or "Baaka") language. However, this type of vocabulary is subject to widespread borrowing among the Pygmies and neighboring peoples, and the "Baaka" language was only reconstructed to the 15th century.Serge Bahuchet, 1993, History of the inhabitants of the central African rain forest: perspectives from comparative linguistics. In C.M. Hladik, ed., Tropical forests, people, and food: Biocultural interactions and applications to development. Paris: Unesco/Parthenon.
African Pygmy populations are genetically diverse and extremely divergent from all other human populations, suggesting they have an ancient indigenous lineage. Their Genetic marker represent the second-most ancient divergence, after those typically found in Khoisan peoples.Also see Recent advances in genetics shed some light on the origins of the various Pygmy groups. Researchers found "an early divergence of the ancestors of Pygmy hunter–gatherers and farming populations 60,000 years ago, followed by a split of the Pygmies' ancestors into the Western and Eastern pygmy groups 20,000 years ago."
New evidence suggests East and West African Pygmy children have different growth patterns. The difference between the two groups may indicate the Pygmies' short stature did not start with their common ancestor but instead evolved independently in adapting to similar environments, which adds support that some sets of genes related to height were advantageous in Eastern Pygmy populations, but not in Western Pygmy populations.
However, Roger Blench argues that the Pygmies are not descended from residual hunter-gatherer groups but rather are offshoots of larger neighboring ethnolinguistic groups that had adopted forest subsistence strategies. Blench notes the lack of clear linguistic and archaeological evidence for the antiquity of pygmy cultures and peoples and also notes that the genetic evidence can be problematic. Blench also notes that there is no evidence of the Pygmies having hunting technology distinctive from that of their neighbors, and argues that the short stature of pygmy populations can arise relatively quickly (in less than a few millennia) due to strong selection pressures.
From the end of 2002 through January 2003 around 60,000 Pygmy civilians and 10,000 combatants were killed and often cannibalized in an extermination campaign known as "Effacer le tableau" during the Second Congo War."Between October 2002 and January 2003, two the rebel groups, the MLC and RCD-N in the East of the Congo launched a premeditated, systematic genocide against the local tribes and Pygmies nicknamed operation "Effacer le tableau" ("erase the board"). During their offensive against the civilian population of the Ituri region, the rebel groups left more than 60,000 dead and over 100,000 displaced. The rebels even engaged in slavery and cannibalism. Human Rights Reports state that this was due to the fact that rebel groups, often far away from their bases of supply and desperate for food, enslaved the Pygmies on captured farms to grow provisions for their militias or when times get really tough simply slaughter them like animals and devour their flesh which some believe gives them magical powers.11. Fatality Level of Dispute (military and civilian fatalities): 70,000 estimated"see: Human rights activists have made demands for the massacre to be recognized as genocide.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the Ituri conflict, Ugandan-backed rebel groups were accused by the UN of enslaving Mbutis to prospect for minerals and forage for forest food, with those returning empty handed being killed and eaten.
Their origin and the route of their migration to Asia is a matter of great speculation. They are genetically distant from Africans and have been shown to have separated early from Asians, suggesting that they are either surviving descendants of settlers from the early out-of-Africa migration of the Great Coastal Migration of the Proto-Australoids, or that they are descendants of one of the founder populations of modern humans.
Frank Kingdon-Ward in the early 20th century reported a tribe of pygmy Tibeto-Burman speakers known as the Taron people inhabiting the remote region of Mt. Hkakabo Razi in Southeast Asia on the border of China (Yunnan and Tibet), Burma, and India.Alan Rabinowitz 1990s, P. Christiaan Klieger 2003 A Burmese survey done in the 1960s reported a mean height of an adult male Taron at and that of females at . These are the only known "pygmies" of clearly Mongoloid descent.
The cause of their diminutive size is unknown, but diet and endogamous marriage practices have been cited. The population of Taron pygmies has been steadily shrinking and is now down to only a few individuals.
Birdsell classified Aboriginal Australians into three major groups, mixed together to varying degrees: the Carpentarians, best represented in Arnhem Land; the Murrayans, centred in southeastern Australia; and the Barrineans. He argued that people related to Oceanic Negritos were the first arrivals, and had been absorbed or replaced over time by later incoming peoples; the present-day Barrineans retained the greatest proportion of ancestry from this original Negrito group, "but this is not to say that the Barrineans are Negritos ... the Negritic component is clearly subordinate, and ... the preponderant element is Murrayian." This trihybrid model is generally considered defunct today; craniometric, (1970). 9780855570019, University of Sydney. ISBN 9780855570019 genetic, and linguistic evidence does not support a separate origin of Barrinean or other Aboriginal groups, and physical differences between Aboriginal groups can be explained by adaptation to differing environments.
In 2002, the purported existence of short-statured people in Queensland was brought into the public eye by Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin in an article published by the right-wing Quadrant magazine (edited by Windschuttle himself). The authors argued that these people were evidence for a distinct Negrito population in support of Birdsell's theory, and claimed that "the fact that the Australian pygmies have been so thoroughly expunged from public memory suggests an indecent concurrence between scholarly and political interests", because evidence of descent from earlier or later waves of origin could lead to conflicting claims of priority by Aboriginal people and hence pose a threat to political co-operation among them. This and other publications promoting the trihybrid model drew several responses, which went over the current scientific evidence against the theory, and suggested that attempts to revive the theory were motivated by an agenda of undermining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander claims to native title.
Some Aboriginal oral histories and from Queensland tell of "little red men". In 1957 a member of the Jinibara (the Dalla people) tribe of SE Queensland, Gaiarbau, who was born in 1873 and had lived for many years traditionally with his tribe, said that he knew of the "existence of these "little people – the Dinderi", also known as "Dimbilum", "Danagalalangur" and "Kandju". Gaiarbau claims he saw members of a "tribe of small people ... and said they were like dwarfs ... and ... not ... any of them stood five feet 1.5m." The Dinderi are also recorded in other stories, such as one concerning a platypus myth and another, The Dinderi and Gujum - The Legend of the Stones of the Mary River. Audio
Susan McIntyre-Tamwoy, archaeologist and adjunct professor at James Cook University, has written of the northern Cape York Aboriginal people's belief of the bipotaim, which is when "the landscape as we know it today was created". Bipotaim was formed "before people, although not perhaps before the short people or the red devils as these were also here before people". She writes, "many ethnographers recorded stories of 'short people' or what they referred to as 'pygmy tribes, such as Lindsey Page Winterbotham. She used information collected both through oral accounts (including those of Injinoo people), observation and archival research. McIntyre-Tamwoy recounts a bipotaim story: "We are the short people pygmies?. Red devils occupy parts of the adjacent stony coast but our home is here in the sand dunes and forest. Before the Marakai 'white came to our land the people were plentiful and they roamed the land. They understood the land and called out in the language of the country to seek permission, as they should ...".
According to Nathan Sentance, a librarian from the indigenous Wiradjuri nation employed by the Australian National Museum, there is no known archaeological or biological evidence such a people existed. Sentance claims it is a myth used to justify the colonisation of Australia as well as other countries by Europeans.
In 2008, the remains of at least 25 miniature humans, who lived between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, were found on the islands of Palau in Micronesia.
During the 1900s, when Vanuatu was known as New Hebrides, sizable pygmy tribes were first reported throughout northeastern Espiritu Santo. It is likely that they are not limited to this region of New Hebrides. Nonetheless, there is no anthropological evidence linking pygmies to other islands of Vanuatu.
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