Talk about.....

Wooowwww....It's been more than a year!!!!

Actually, it's a year and one week, since my last post in this blog. It's exactly 12.00 am in Tucson, and here I am procrastinating....hee..hee..hee...

Yeah, procrastinate....cause somehow I feel tired of studying, I need to do something else...what can I do in this hour? Watching movie? It needs more than an hour....Eating? O my goodness, that's bad at this hour....Sleeping? That's not a solution! I do need to finish these papers tonight, so...no sleeping at all!!!!

So...I suddenly remember about this "abandoned" blog of mine....

Well....now i don't know what I'm gonna write here...hayaaahhh....(kagak guna gini yah procrastinating teh...xixixixixii...)

OK, lets talk about some educative things here...

Right now I'm working on a project called "Austronesian Project". It's basically a study of the peopling of Indonesia. I would call this project as an anthropological models of social structure, genes and language. From this project, I'm gonna take a "small" piece of it for the topic of my thesis, while the "big" piece is going to be my dissertation (hopefully....).

That "small" piece is about the pygmies....familiar with that term?

Hmm...lets talk a little about "the pygmies" for now....if it is interesting then I will talk more about it in depth in my next posts...(good way of procrastinating, huh....hee..hee...)


OK...here we go...

PYGMIES....what is pygmies?

The word “pygmies” are usually referred to a small size individual. For example, the following definitions have been given to a word ‘pigmy’ in some representative dictionaries:
Main Entry: pyg·my
Etymology: Middle English pigmei, from Latin pygmaeus of a pygmy, dwarfish, from Greek pygmaios, from pygmE fist, measure of length
1. often capitalized : any of a race of dwarfs described by ancient Greek authors
2.capitalized : any of a small people of equatorial Africa ranging under five feet (1.5 meters) in height
3. a (1) : an unusually small person (2) : an insignificant or unimpressive person
b : something very small of its kind
(Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/pygmy)

Pygmy, Pigmy
1. a member of one of several groups of very small people who live in central Africa:Pygmies average about 1.5 metres in height.
2. Disapproving someone who is not important or who has little skill:a political pygmyan intellectual pygmy
(Cambridge Dictionary online, http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=64590&dict=CALD)

In Anthropology, pygmies refer to specific members of one hunter-gatherer people living in equatorial rainforest. They have characteristics of short stature, maximum 4-5 feet, or below 1.5 meter in height (although there is variability in different pygmy’s population, these numbers are the maximum of all in available records today). We can find large number of pygmy population in Central Africa and a smaller number in pockets of regions in Asia, such as in the Andaman Islands of India in Bay of Bengal and in islands of Southeast Asia (Philippine, Malaysia, and Thailand). The pygmies in Asia are usually called ‘the Negritos’ (from the Spanish diminutive for Negro). The phenotypic typified by a small average height, gracile build, dark pigmentation, and kinky hair are similar to those of African pygmies; therefore, it suggested the recent African origin. (Endicott et al., 2003)

In 2005, an expedition led by Teuku Jacob in the area where the hominid fossil called Homo floresiensis was unearthed, found a population of short stature people, or pygmies, in a village called Rampasasa less than a mile away from the original discovery site of the fossil. The Rampasasa people have stature around 1.45m for male and 1.35m for female. This finding gave evidence for some scientist who do not agree of putting Homo floresiensis in a new species. In a recent publication, Jacob et al., 2006, report their latest analysis of the hominid fossil or Homo floresiensis in comparison to the pygmies of Rampasasa and other modern human populations. They gave evidence against the new species Homo floresiensis. Some of the evidence is that the feature of the neurocranium and face are generally encountered among the Australomelanesians. Similarly, there are some features, such as the recess between the tympanic plate and the entoglenoid pyramid, which are thought to be unique and can not be found in other species, are actually quite common in Australian and Tasmanian crania. The absence of a true chin has been listed as a distinguishing feature of Homo floresiensis, but Jacob shows that 93.4% of the Rampasasa population (the pygmies) has a neutral (flat) or negative chin. They argued that the small brain of Homo floresiensis is caused by the developmental defect called microcephaly and concluded that the fossils are actually not primitive, but those of modern humans. The LB1 (Homo floresiensis) individual exhibits a combination of characteristics. They are not primitive or unique, but rather regional and found in other modern human populations, particularly some still living on Flores (the pygmies of Rampasasa is one of the example). Also, they are not derived, but strikingly developmentally disordered. (Jacob et al., 2006)

Hmm...that's a glance to give you a picture of what Pygmies is...interested? I'll talk about it more on my next procrastination.....xixixiixi....

Here I give some references that I use to write this post...it's a must to put references when you put people's idea in your writing... :)

Reff:

Endicott, P., Tomas, M., Gilbert, P., Stringer, C., Lalueza-Fox, C., Willerslev, E., Hansen, A.J., and Cooper, A. 2003. The Genetic Origins of the Andaman Islanders. A.J.Hum.Genet. 72:178-184.
Jacob, T., Indriati, E., Soejono, R.P., Hsu, K., Frayer, D.W., Eckhart, R.B., Kuperavage, A.J., Thorne, A., and Henneberg, M. 2006. Pygmoid Autralomelanesian Homo sapiens skeletal remains from Liang Bua, Flores: Population affinities and pathological abnormalities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103: 13421-13426