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Updated: May 22, 2025
The Papuan is of medium height; fleshy rather than muscular; color a sooty brown; forehead high, but narrow and retreating; nose sometimes flat and wide at nostrils, but oftener hooked with depressed point; lips thick and projecting; high cheek bones; prognathism general; hair black and frizzly. He is negroid in appearance, and is said to resemble the African of the coast region opposite Aden.
Some tribes are described as physically and mentally degenerate, and prognathism is in many cases strongly declared, the lower part of the face having an ape-like contour, and the protruding chin, that feature peculiar to man, being very deficient. In their great abdominal development the adult Akkas resemble the children of Arabs and negroes.
It is noticeable that there is a greater tendency toward prognathism than we have heretofore met with; the forehead, while high, is moderately retreating and the supra-orbital ridges prominent in most individuals; the hair is brown-black and is inclined to curl in locks.
The Semangs of Malacca are jet-black in color, with thick lips, flat nose, and protruding abdomen. In regard to the characteristic of prognathism, it is possessed in various degrees, the most pronounced instance being seen in the photograph of one of the Kalangs of Java, a tribe which has recently become extinct. The face of this individual is strikingly ape-like in profile.
So, too, difference in texture of hair is a matter of degree, not kind, and is caused by heat, moisture, exposure, and the like. The bony skeleton presents no distinctly racial lines of variation. Prognathism "presents too many individual varieties to be taken as a distinctive character of race." Difference in physical measurements does not show the Negro to be a more primitive evolutionary form.
In race description the prominence of the edges of the jaws is called prognathism, and its absence orthognathism. The significance of the two lower race characters as compared with those of the Indo-European is as follows: Negro. Mongolian. Indo-European.
The facial angle is formed by two planes one more or less vertical which is in a straight line with the forehead and the incisors; the other, horizontal, which passes through the organs of hearing, and the lower nasal bone. Prognathism, in anthropological language, means that particular projection of the jaw which modifies the facial angle. Of course nobody smiled.
The other type is quasi-Hindu in its delicacy of form, with small heads, oval faces, noses a la Roxolane, lips sub-tumid but without prognathism, and fine almond-shaped eyes, with remarkably thick and silky lashes. The throat is thin, the bosom is high and well carried, or, as the admiring Arab says, "nejda;" the limbs are statuesque, and the hands and feet are Norman rather than Saxon.
Its prognathism or protrusion is extreme, and the canine teeth were very strong, while the molars were evidently large and increased in size backward, a non-human characteristic. At La Denise, in the upper Loire, France, have been found the frontal bones of a man like the Neanderthal man in type, the forehead being depressed and retreating, and the superciliary ridges large and thick.
But a little consideration will show that any 'facial angle' that has been devised, can be competent to express the structural modifications involved in prognathism and orthognathism, only in a rough and general sort of way.
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