Talk:Melanesians/Archive 1

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Archive 1

Melanesians?

The word Melanesian does not represent a true people or a location on earth that existed thousands of years ago for explorers to travel from. This is a critical point because the word Melanesia has been used to re-write (and by extension – devalue) the travels of African people as they settle much of the South Pacific. By using the word ‘Melanesia’ or ‘Melanesian’ the link from the South Pacific to Africa is severed. The term (and therefore the considerable reference to global exploration – colonization) of European is identified with those people who are from Europe. Asian identifies the people from the Asiatic part of the world. However, when the term Melanesia or Melanesian is used, the word use to identify the people of dark skin who were present in the South Pacific when the colonist arrived, how can the word reference a people from the place that they travel to? How can this be? There is no location of Melanesia for travelers to come from. Logically, dark skinned people in the South Pacific and dark skin people in Africa must have a common ancestor. This would mean that African explorers journeyed to the far reaches of the South Pacific from their land in Africa thousands of years ago. Again, since the term Melanesian is liberally applied to those who are of dark skin the only logical location for explorers who were represented in the South Pacific island to have originated from is Africa.

The current inhabitants of Melanesia are not Melanesian they are Fijian, Solomon Islanders, New Guinean, etc… There may be some value to using the word Melanesia as a geographical locator of a group of dark skinned people in the South Pacific but why?--Vulagaman (talk) 00:12, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Melanesians and Negritos are the original inhabitants of Asia, and the remaining populations, because of isolation, have been less mixed with recent waves of immigrants. However originally all of Africa, Asia and Europe was populated by people of the Black phenotype. The proliferation of both the 'Caucasian' and 'Mongolian' phenotypes (to use the old pre-genetic 'racial' classifications) is a very recent phenomenon. For instance the Northern Chinese, Koreans and Japanese have a Han Chinese ancestor in common who lived between 1600-1100 BC. http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-biology/2018/04/10/common-ancestor-of-han-chinese-japanese-and-koreans-dated-to-3000-3600-years-ago/ At the same time the 'white' phenotype in Europe did not come in until 5,000 years ago (3,000 BC) or just 4,000 years ago - see Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTY9K1Q_Sbg&t=1165 83.84.100.133 (talk) 18:55, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

The Melanesians do not directly originate from Africa according to current knowledge, and certainly not a few thousands of years ago. They immigrated from the Asian mainland tens of thousands of years ago. There are some indications that people resembling Australo-Melanesians rather than the current Mongoloid Asians populated South, Southeast and even parts of East Asia by 10,000 years ago or so.

Read Neoteny. It seems that more than any other modern group of humans, including African populations, it is Australo-Melanesians who most resemble in appearance the first humans (H. sapiens sapiens) who migrated out of Africa. The dark skin and curly hair is simply common inheritance of Sub-Saharan Africans and Australo-Melanesians, not an indication of more recent connections. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 09:41, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Neoteny is an outdated idea from the era of scientific racism and biological determinism. 83.84.100.133 (talk) 18:55, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

This is "Afrocentrist" codswallop. All humans originate in Africa, and Melanesians are no more "African" than Koreans, Inuit or Swedes. The fact that they superficially resemble some Subsaharan Africans does not indicate any unique affinity between the two groups. Trilobright (talk) 11:56, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

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Move discussion in progress

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Ridiculous article - Suggest correction or deletion

The population numbers are prima facie ridiculous. Vanuatu alone has a population of nearly 250,000, of which the overwhelming majority are indigenous and Melanesian. The arbitrary distinction between 'Papuan' people and Papua New Guinean Melanesians is politically motivated and indefensible. Please either fix these and many other errors or delete this page; it's a travesty.

Origin newest research

This suggests that Melanesians represent an early wave of occupation into SE Asia, probably one that followed on the heels of the aboriginal migration into Australia, and it may be supported by the Denisovan evidence. We should find more citations (especially those that form conclusions) then add it somewhere here. Kortoso (talk) 17:23, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Looks like Dienekes is discussing the same article here:

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2016/03/neandertal-and-denisovan-dna-from.html

Kortoso (talk) 17:52, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Wildly inaccurate, bordering on pro-Indonesia propaganda

. . .

This page appears to be an attempt to locate the majority of Melanesian people within Indonesia.

The 'editors' have added authoritative sources - but none of them support the population claims made here.

As commented below, this page is a farce and travesty, and should be amended or deleted.

The facts are that Indonesia has mounted a very well-documented campaign of slow genocide against the indigenous people of Papua, and their population is much lower than that of fully independent Papua New Guinea, which occupies the other half of the island.

I am more than happy to detail where this article is wrong, and where there are already much more reliable, neutral and well sourced articles on Melanesia. In fact the POV dispute tag is probably wrong, it probably should be just deleted.

In support of my contention, I note that edits are made by anonymous editors. Also, I was only alerted to this page by an Indonesian FB user, who used it as a basis for disputing criticism of Indonesia's record in (West) Papua.

Please see this (public) link to a discussion on my public profile:

https://www.facebook.com/aboutjasonbrown/posts/781238935338191

--Avaiki (talk) 20:56, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Imported a bunch of text from Melanesia

I'd like to note that today I imported a mass of material from the "European encounter and definition" and "People" sections of Melanesia into this article. The material properly belongs here because it is about the Melanesian people rather than the island groups where they live. I intend to reduce the source material to a summary. Looie496 (talk) 16:26, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

I think it would be better to preserve the sections from the Melanesia section as-is. The "history" of the Melanesians stretches deep back into prehistory and is a matter or speculation. Actually, the European encounter and definition" and "People" sections of the Melanesia article really belong here rather than there. Kortoso (talk) 23:27, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

'unpleasant features'

While I'm sure that it is historically accurate, does anyone not think it slightly inappropriate to have the following quote;

all the nations of this major division of Oceania are more or less black in colour, with curly, fuzzy or sometimes nearly woolly hair, flat noses, wide mouths and unpleasant features, and their limbs are often very frail and seldom well shaped... Their aptitudes and their intelligence are also generally largely inferior to those of the copper-skinned race [i.e. Polynesians]".[6]:169

Common sense dictates this quote is highly offensive to Melanesians and needs revising, if not removing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.193.1.243 (talk) 17:36, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree and have removed the offensive text. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DanJazzy (talk • contribs) 14:42, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Interesting article

I found this article: Genes of This Tribe Carry A DNA of A Third Unknown. I thought it might be helpful to this article, which lies outside of my current interests. Have fun. - Jack Sebastian (talk) 06:37, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

@Jack Sebastian: THE GENES OF THIS TRIBE CARRY A DNA OF A THIRD UNKNOWN HUMAN SPECIES. Yes, this is important. It should also be noted that DNA has found the Melanesians to be the least Sapiens among all existing Homo. --Yomal Sidoroff-Biarmskii 16:24, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

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Infobox

Hi Jeblat,

No, "Melanesian" isn't an ethnic group, not even close. We don't have an ethno info box for Negroid, for example. I see we do for Indigenous peoples of the Americas, but from the way it's presented it's clear that we're not saying "Indian" is a single ethnic group. From your response to my removal of the info box, it seems we haven't made that point clear in the case of Melanesians. I suppose we could put the box back if it were redone to make that point. E.g., lose the photo, reword the rubric so it's clear we're talking about multiple peoples, etc. — kwami (talk) 21:02, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Kwamikagami:. I see where you're getting at. I'd be totally cool with your recommendations on the changes in the infobox itself by removing the photo and to make it clear that the article consists of multiple ethnic peoples. Please proceed. -Jeblat (talk) 15:45, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Jeblat: Looking over the box again, I don't see that it adds anything of value. It does give a population figure, but that was tagged as being from a potentially unreliable source. I was surprised at finding an ethno info box at 'Native American', and was surprised again that I didn't find it misleading. I think that's because of the title of the article, which would be hard to misunderstand as a single ethnicity. Similarly with Aboriginal Australians, it's obviously a collective term (and also in that case has a legal definition, so it is coherent in that sence). But I don't see how to replicate that effect with "Melanesian", which is a much less well-known term and certainly sounds like an ethnic rather than racial or geographic group. If we had a racial info box, that somehow made the topic obvious, that would be appropriate here, but meanwhile I see a downside but no upside to having the box.

BTW, the motivation for removing the box came from a problem we had at Papuans, where an editor was insisting that people were ethnically "Austronesian" rather than "Papuan" if they spoke an Austronesian language, even if they had 0% Austronesian ancestry (that is, were 100% "Papuan") and were culturally indistinguishable from their "Papuan" neighbors, completely confusing language, genetics and ethnicity. (And they were adamant that their sources, which contradicted them even in the abstracts, supported them.) There have also been a lot of bad WP articles in which language families -- sometimes even undemonstrated ones like "Altaic" -- were treated as defining ethnicity, that somehow "Uralic religion" (not a reconstruction of proto-Uralic religion, but modern-day) is a topic that can be defined by language. So I tend to react negatively to our often simplistic or historically-charged English terms for people being used as if they defined those people, when to the people themselves they may be close to meaningless.

Now, if the Melanesians themselves -- from the Bird's Head of New Guinea to Fiji -- see themselves as family of nations, as something coherent and distinct from e.g. Polynesians and Moluccans, the way Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians (and to a minor extent the Finno-Ugric peoples) have come to see themselves, then that would be a different matter. Ethnicity is identity. If that's the case, then I have no trouble with an ethno box. — kwami (talk) 18:40, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

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