The Moros came late to Mindanao.

  Anthropology has failed to agree upon a classification of the primitive peoples who inhabited Mindanao and Sulu prior to the coming of the Moros. We know that first settlers in this islands were tribes of dwarf blacks or Negritos, a broad-headed, broad-nosed, frizzy-haired race. There appears evidence that human life existed in the Philippines at least 20,000 years ago, in the Pleistocene Age. The antiquity of man in the East Indian Archipelago has not been fully established, but skulls of the Talagai Man of Australia, of the Java Man found at Wadjak, together with Stone Age culture of the Dutch found in Tasmania, seem to suggest a possible lower Paleolithic culture in the Philippine islands.

  The original tribes of black pygmies were driven back into the mountains, to be displaced by a first wave of brown people who swept over the Philippine Archipelago probably as early as 5,000 years ago. The primary black inhabitants have survived, however, to remain as a negligible proportion of the population of the islands.

  Padre Crevas, the early historian of the Philippines, preserves for us a description of these Negritos as the Spaniards found them in 1645:

"There are in this island (Mindanao) black, nomadic tribes who recognize no subjection… they live more like brutes, fleeing from all who approach them, doing harm too when they can. They do not settle in villages, nor do they, in these inclement wilds, have other shelter than the trees. They do not use any other ornament than that which they inherited from nature, covering their modesty so meagerly that they altogether fail in the endeavor. Their arms consist of a bow and arrows, tipped with a poison known only to themselves and it appears that this is the first people who occupied them (the islands) -- that these are the original inhabitants of the soil and being the primitive race, no one can account for their origin."¹

In the traditions of a people with a history as misty as that of the Negritos, it is interesting to find references to the Deluge. The Aetas say that Manama, the great God, made men from blades of grass, weaving the grass into human forms. They tell of a great flood which covered the face of the earth and of the drowning of all of the people except two men and a woman.

These survivals of pre-history still remain in the Philippines, represented by various tribes of Bataks, Aetas, Mamanuas. They are interesting as carry-overs from the Paleolithic culture period.

We pass on to the race of brown people who succeeded them in Mindanao. The Negritos were the first victims of the wholesale redistribution of population which was accomplished by the waves of incoming people who swept over the islands.

The history of the human occupation of Mindanao and Sulu is one of constant raids and overlapping cultures. With the first of these series of raids from the mainland of Asia, we find the Negrito falling back to the inhospitable mountains and his place on the pleasant seacoast pre-empted by a race of brown-skinned Indo-Australians.

An understanding of these Indo-Australian invaders of Mindanao must always remain an impossibility. Their roots are buried in the mist of pre-history. Anthropological research can speculate, but we can never hope to roll away the fog which envelops the long trail these people have trod which ends in Mindanao. To understand their origins we should have to go back to ancient myths of white men in the Pacific, and it would be necessary to accept certain speculations involving a science which might well be called "synthetic anthropology." For these long-haired mountaineers of Mindanao are brown-white men misplaced in the silent hills!

Their history involves a consideration of our most remote ancestors. Max Muller, delving into the origins of the Aryan race, states that Vedic literature may go back for 5000 years. The Vedic hymns show the Indian branch of the Aryan race on the march to the southeast. The Rig-Veda is believed to antedate BC 3000. It is made up of a collection of 1017 short poems in which mention is made of the black aborigines who preceded the Aryans to India. It is here, perhaps, that we might probe for the origins of the pagan Indo-Australians of Mindanao.

It is believed that a race of people called Armenoids trickled down through India from a country north of Macedonia. There are indications that these people preceded the Aryans to India. A much later invasion of the Aryans pushed the Armenoids out into Burma and Malaya, and down through Indonesia into the Pacific. They entered the pacific at an early date, as is shown by the absence in their language of Sanskrit words which came into use after their departure from India.

The Armenoids became the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean, setting up the maritime cities of Acre, Sidon and Tyre. In the Pacific, the Armenoids became the Polynesians, and possibly were the basic ancestors of the Mindanao hill men. It is at least a pleasant conjecture, and it places the antiquity of the Indo-Australians at a well deserved early date.

These Indo-Australian people of Mindanao survive as very ancient fragments of a race which was gradually and partially absorbed by the dominant Caucasian and Mongoloid elements with whom they came into contact. It has been suggested by anthropologists that this premier brown stock of Mindanao is "a branch from the Caucasian stem dating from a time when the Caucasian race was not as white as it is now, and that probably the dark strain in India is due to these aborigines rather than to Negroid influences."²

Kroeber, in his "Anthropology", has this to say of the hill people of the East Asian Archipelago:

"In the lapse of ages, the greater number of Caucasians in and near Europe took on, more and more, their present characteristics, whereas, this backward branch in the region of the Indian Ocean, kept its primitive and undifferentiated ways."

Today, these dark-whites live in scattered groups in the swamps and jungles of interior Mindanao and other islands of the Philippines. Intermixture with succeeding invasion of Indonesians and Malays has greatly diluted the original blood and given rise to great differences of opinion among anthropologists.

"Closely allied to the them, and equally as primitive, are the Moi of Indo-China, the Sanoi of the Malay States, the Toala of Celebes, the Kolarian tribes of India and the Vedda of Ceylon."

A glance at the ethnology of these people might be in order. Somewhere in the period of about BC 30,000, the Cro-Magnon man, a true Homo Sapiens, originated as the ancestor of the living races of mankind. To the Cro-Magnon is credited the beginnings of the Caucasian race. Shortly after the rise of the Cro-Magnons, the human race underwent a certain degree of specialization, and we find the Caucasian stem forking into two main branches.

One branch forges ahead to form a race of light people, the ancestors of the modern European; the other strain falters to emerge as the Indo-Australian. These Indo-Australians, a race of dark, short, slender, wavy-haired people with long heads and broad noses, were in the first wave of emigrants from Asia. They have been in Mindanao for a long time. A sketch of their occupation of the islands is part of the pre-history of Mindanao.

In order to understand the setting for the earliest battles of the Moros, we must have a clear picture of these Indo-Australians who preceded the Moros to Mindanao.

Mindanao today is a vast area of 38,000 square miles, fringed by a thin ring of plantations along the coast line. Scattered at wide intervals, miles apart, are the few towns of the island. Even after more than thirty-five years of American occupation we find few roads, and those only in the immediate vicinity of the settlements. There is no steamship or other transportation service except to these few towns. The Sulu Archipelago is still a closed book to the tourist.

The year 1935 finds 2,000,000 acres of land remaining unexplored in Mindanao, 5,000,000 of standing jungle, and less than twelve per cent of the land under cultivation.

Along the coast line, planters have hacked out a bite from the jungle wall, there to plant coconuts, hemp and rubber. Inside is jungle, black and empty. There in the inner mountains of the island, live the long-haired wild people, Indo-Australian survivors of another day.

These pagans live in a world apart, which is peopled with dreams of ogres and ghosts and demons,. They still practice rites and customs which originated in the dawn of man. Among these practices are the ancient arts of hepatoscopy and haruspicy, of which there is a widespread knowledge.³

In the legends of the Indo-Australians are to be found many references to their origin. It is interesting to note that many of them agree in tracing their ancestors to a continent which sank beneath the sea. There is no place in this volume for a discussion of sunken continents, but the traditions of the Indo-Australians bring to mind the stories of the lost Atlantis, of Mu and of Lemuria. The presence of these brown-white men in the jungles of Mindanao makes it easier to believe the stories of lost civilizations and vanished peoples dating from before some awful catastrophe in the Pacific.

Geologists tell us that the original population of the Philippines could have emigrated as a fragment from early civilizations of the geological continent of Gondwana Land. The lost continent of Lemuria, now covered by the waters of the Indian Ocean, could have been the center of dispersal or a stopping place on the road from India. Even the highly debatable sunken colony of Mu, presumably located in mid-Pacific in ancient times, could have been the homeland of the Indo-Australians of Mindanao.

The story of these aboriginal settlers of Mindanao is not within the province of this book. They were but an interlude, the lull before the storm which ushered in the Malay.

With these comments on the two prehistoric populations of Mindanao, we leave them there in their forested hills. They are an eternal people, endless as time itself. They remain as survivors of an earlier time when the world was new, and they have lived on and on without change in the face of a changing world. Over their silent heads has swept wave after wave of Indonesian, Malayan, Spanish and American invasion. They represent a mysterious anthropological riddle that can never be fully solved. Back of them is unwritten and misty history. Back of that is pre-history, inscrutable and ageless. Four hundred years of white rule has affected them not at all. It is but an incident on the hoary edges of an ancient past.

With imagination we can picture a dim stream of brown figures coming from a far-away home to settle in Mindanao. Where they came from we can never establish with certainty. They have preserved no records. We can only know them as two vague races of black Negritos and brown Indo-Australians who fell from the ranks to linger in Mindanao on that day when civilization took the march.

We have seen the Negritos pushed to the mountains by the brown horde of incoming Indo-Australians. On the pleasant coasts of Mindanao brown pagan replaced black pygmy. This brown nomadic tribal existence must have persisted along the coast for many centuries, for it extended up to the turbulent period of Mongoloid-Malayan invasions, which began apparently with the coming of the Moros about BC 100.

It is not possible to fix a date for the original invasion of the Moros. We now that the great Polynesian migration from the East Indian Archipelago to the islands of the Pacific Ocean began about AD 100, and that this flood did not reach the eastern Pacific until late in AD 700. The tempo of the early migrations was not a fast one and it might be assumed that at least two hundred years were required to settle the East Indian region sufficiently to make necessary the removal of the Polynesians to the Pacific islands.

As a part of the confused scramble of the races flowing eastward out of Asia, it appears that the Moros first came to Mindanao and Sulu not later than the first century before Christ.

Filipiniana Reprint Series © 1985 Cacho Hermanos, Inc.

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