Abstract
THE authorities of the Raffles Museum, Singapore, have added a new series, to be known as Series B, to the Museum Bulletin. The present publication, which will now become Series A, hitherto has been devoted almost entirely to communications of a biological character. The new series will be anthropological, and for some time to come will be devoted largely to publication of the results of a scheme of research in the prehistory of the Malay Peninsula, for which the Carnegie Corporation of New York has voted a subvention extending over a period of three years. In the first issue of the new series are three reports on recent excavationsthe first in Kedah by Mr. H. D. Collings, the second in a cave in Bukit Christamani by Mr. M. F. W. Tweedie, and the third on kitchen middens at Guak Kepeh, Wellesley Province, by Dr. P. V. van Stein Callenfels. The most important, as well as the longest, communication is from Dr. van Stein Callenfels, who, in “The Melanesian Civilization of Eastern Asia”, contributes a detailed analysis of the Hoabinian stone age culture, so called from the early culture first distinguished in Tonkin, which he traces throughout the East so far as observed from China and Japan to Celebes, and analyses into three stages, in which he sees evidence for contacts between a people of a palaeolithic type of culture with another in a protoneolithic stage. In incorporating the new evidence obtained under the present scheme in his analysis, and at the same time making use of the evidence afforded by earlier excavations in the Malay Peninsula, notwithstanding their defects in method, Dr. van Stein Callenfels also turns to the discussion of the position of Wadjak man, to whom he is inclined to assign a date later than the Pleistocene, but to regard him as a very old representative of the Melanesoid culture.
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Ethnology of the Far East. Nature 138, 876 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138876a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138876a0