Abstract
THE BARAS OF MADAGASCAR.—Dr. R. Verneau has published in L'Anthropologie, t. xxxiii., Pts. 5 and 6, the results of a detailed examination of eleven Bara skulls now in the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle at Paris. The generally accepted view, based largely upon linguistic evidence, is that the numerous races of Madagascar, other than the Malayan Imerinas, or Hpvas, are to be related to the negroid peoples of Indonesia and the adjacent area. A comparison with Papuan skulls, however, shows that they are clearly differentiated from this group, to which they might be expected to show resemblances, by certain features, such as the smaller size of the skull, less marked dolichocephaly, a relative narrowing of the frontal region in comparison with the breadth at the parietals, a lesser breadth of the face at the level of the cheek bones and the upper maxillaries. Further, not only do these characters exclude affinity with the Papuan, but they indicate a marked resemblance to an African type, although with our present inadequate knowledge of the physical characters of the inhabitants of Madagascar it is not possible to indicate to which group precisely they should be related.
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Research Items. Nature 113, 871–873 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/113871a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/113871a0