ANTHROPOLOGICAL GENETICS AND PREHISTORY IN MELANESIA: IS THERE A CONTRIBUTION?

Abstract

FROM the expatriate social anthropologist's perspective, Melanesia's most distinctive characteristic as a cultural area is its immense diversity (e.g., Langness and Weschler, 1971:10). So too from the viewpoint of biological anthropology: referring to material from Papua New Guinea I and my colleagues published some years ago, Wood (1978:463) claims 'By far the most remarkable result of this research has been the discovery of huge stores of genetic variation within these small populations'. The demonstration of the human biological diversity of Papua New Guinea, in terms of quantifiable genetic evidence, began more than a half-century ago with the report of Heydon and Murphy (1924) on the 'biochemical index' (i.e., the ABO blood groups) of some 753 indigenous inhabitants. The burgeoning record of biological variation since that time, however, has not often enough led to interpretations of historical or structural relationships.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.