Studies in race crossing. IX. Crosses of Australians and Papuans with Caucasians, Chinese, and other races.

Abstract

SummaryIn continuation of the series of studies of racial crosses, this paper gives a genctical account of various race hybrids, in which Australian aborigines or Papuans are involved with Chinese, Malayans or Filipinos. Several families are traced through four or five generations, and some involve three or (in one case) four different races. Most of these racial combinations have not been studied previously.The racial characters recorded in Tables include colour of eyes, hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and skin, form of hair and measurements of head and of ears. In addition various observations of brow ridges, orbits, eyefolds, nose, lips and mouth were made. The Mongolian brachycephaly is strongly inherited from male Chinese ancestors; also the eyefolds, especially the top fold, which is more or less independent of the epicanthic fold. In Malay crosses the face and head are often very narrow. Marked segregation in sibs can occur in head form (cephalic index), hair colour, hair form, skin colour and other features. It has already been shown that in the F1 of aborigines × White the skin is near white. The same is true of Papuan × White, and in addition the child's hair is flaxen or very light brown although the Papuans appear to have always black or near-black hair.Incidentally, it was also observed that the Papuans not infrequently have marked brow ridges, depressed nasal root and sunken orbits like the Australian aborigines, indicating common elements in the ancestry of these two races.The Papuan nose, commonly with an overhanging tip, differs in some respects from the Semitic nose, and appears to be an independent (parallel) development.All contrasted human racial characters, such as hair form and colour, head shape, brow ridges, nasal root depression, size of ear and of mouth appear to depend on a small number of cumulative genes, generally without dominance. In how far these are alleles or based on genes at independent loci can only be determined by further investigations.