Who Are The Mysterious Bearded Indians? Part 1.
A Strange Tribe, With Strange Customs and Strange Physical Characteristics, Is Being Investigated in South America. Are They Truly Indians or Are They Descendants of Some Other People?
By A. HYATT VERRILL Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN magazine, June 1928.
Researched by Alan Schenker; digitized by Doug Frizzle February 2012.
http://stillwoods.bl...ed-indians.html
ELSEWHERE in this issue (page 503) the ethnographer, A. Hyatt Verrill, has described a little-known but apparently anomalous tribe of savages who inhabit an inaccessible area in Bolivia. According to his hypothesis these people are not American Indians but some of the island stocks from the distant archipelagos of the Pacific, transplanted to South America. Admittedly, a close scrutiny of the photograph reproduced above lends some support to this suspicion. How these or similar island peoples may have reached South America from across the broad Pacific has perhaps been best explained by the anthropologist, Professor G. Elliot Smith, who believes they came in large canoes. Although this "diffusionist" belief is opposed by the majority of anthropologists, it is nevertheless in good scientific standing and may yet become the accepted doctrine.
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MY most recent expedition to Peru and Bolivia was not, as has been stated in the daily press, in search of the bearded Indians, but was primarily archeological, although large ethnological collections and valuable ethnological data were secured among the living Indians of the interior.
The bearded Indians were merely a side issue. Moreover, I lay no claim to having "discovered" them, and neither are they a "new" race. In fact they have been known, or rather rumored, to exist for fully 200 years; but I believe I am the first to secure ethnological specimens and notes of the tribe and to bring them to the attention of science.
SCIENTIFICALLY, the bearded Indians are of the greatest interest, being in many ways unique, and may prove to be the key that will unlock the mystery of the origin of man in South America.
Even to the casual observer they are strikingly un-Indian in appearance and have a far greater resemblance to inhabitants of the South Sea Islands than to any aborigines of America.
I have long held to the opinion that the Indians of western South America were of Oceanian and not Asiatic origin, and I am convinced that a further study of the bearded Indians will go far towards proving this opinion. The mere fact that the men are bearded is by no means the most important peculiarity of the tribe, although to the public it might seem so. Many, in fact nearly all, Indians possess beards, but as a rule these are shaved off or plucked out; and when allowed to grow, the beard is thin, scant, stiff and wiry.
The beards of the bearded Indians, however, are heavy, luxuriant, bushy, fine, soft, and slightly wavy; as is the hair on the heads. Neither are their features, their bodies nor the shapes of the heads Indian, although a comparison of their cranial measurements with those of Oceanian tribes will be necessary before direct relationships can be established or disproved.
In height they are well above the average forest Indians of South America, and in color they are darker and more of a brown than an ochre or red.
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The dialect of these bearded Indians is wholly unlike any of those of the neighboring tribes. It is low and guttural but not inharmonious, and is spoken in a sing-song monotone.
The vocabulary obtained shows many striking resemblances to dialects of the Pacific archipelagos, some of the words being almost identical and having precisely the same meanings. This is not, however, confined to this tribe, for words in many of the Indian languages of western South America, even the Quichua and Aimara, in fact, show similar resemblances; all of which tends to sustain the theory that these people are all descendants of migrants from Oceania, although doubtless more or less mixed with the races of Asiatic origin farther north.
Edited by Abramelin, 06 February 2013 - 09:10 AM.
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lightly, on 21 January 2013 - 12:02 PM, said:
