This is not Banawe
Dean Bocobo recently asked whether anyone has carbon-dated the Banawe Rice Terraces yet. That question reminds me again of the Igorot-Chinese connection, which we hope becomes clearer and stronger after all the required DNA sequencing and carbon dating have been made. Does anyone have any updates on this? Inez? Tito? I have a little problem, though, with the Ifugao subset of Igorot tribes. If you look at the Ifugaos, a lot of them don't have chinky eyes at all. An anthropologist I've read in a textbook claims Ifugaos are Indonesian in origin. But then again, there are the other evidences to the contrary.
Did you know that there are rice terraces in the heart of China similar to those in Banawe? Surely the technology evolved from a single cultural source?
And if you notice the names of Cordillerans, there's a preponderance of peculiar (to the average Filipino), Chinese-sounding wording and phrasing; for example, bomod-ok, kankana-ey, etc.
Let's go back to the general question: Are Igorots, in general, Chinese? With the exception of the Ifugaos, there's the chinky eyes and the smooth, yellowish skin as physical evidence. If you think about it, the Eskimos look the same; are Eskimos Chinese in origin, too? The people of Batanes look Chinese, too, despite their dark color and relative height. So do the Incas of Peru, as well as the 'American Indians.' Do these groups have Chinese origin, too?
It would be good if someone could enlighten us on this.
**
I remember a brief exchange in this blog in the past where I assumed the Chinese to be the precursor of other Chinese-like cultures, such as the Japanese, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Burmese and Korean, even Thai. Bayi, a Malaysian and coming from a multiracial society, cautioned me not to say that out loud because a lot of people wouldn't take to that thought very kindly. I remember sighing and saying science knows no politics, or science is blind to historical biases, or something to that effect. I hope all that carbon dating and gene sequencing will lay all doubts to rest.
Taiwanese, long-lost cousins of Flips?
Now for a strange twist, take a look at this emailed pic.
Taiwanese jeep: copycat or updated version?
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25 comments:
This official Taiwanese government page on the language of Taiwanese aborigines reveals that most tribes' numbers sound surprisingly Filipino.
Interesting eh?
The original page is found here.
Interesting indeed! Thanks!
Our own rice terraces has the distinction of being created by free men--not slaves. Free men acting for the good of the community.
Yeah, I'm grateful to Inquirer for pointing that out during the centennial. That's something that's very easy to miss because it's found way beneath the physical/engineering spectacle.
Indonesia has also their own rice terraces, just like the Philippines.
Tanong lang. Can you carbon date the terraces? I hear you need something "dead" for that, and for the purpose of determing the age of the bt, something that died when it was first built.
Hello, Cathy, thank you very much. I didn't know that. What I know is that neither the Chocolate Hills are unique to RP. Indonesia has its own version.
Mr. Misantrophe, I suppose the things they used to patch up the rocks were left untouched. I'm not sure... Let's wait for Den Bocobo's blog on it.
Btw, what's your real name? May we know? :)
resty,
I thought this farming system was introduced to us by Indonesians but peru also had their own terraces which dated back 2,000 years ago.
here is the link
http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/terraces/
There is an informative write-up related to this subject in Jojo Malig's blog (refer to the entry "I, Austronesian"):
http://writingthirty.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_archive.html
Relevant to your question is this passage from that post:
"It is important to note that the fishermen-farmers who crossed the straits to Taiwan were not the Sino-Tibetan speaking Han Chinese who today make up the great majority of the Chinese population."
So, if correct, the answer to the question on the Igorot-[Han ]Chinese Chinese connection is 'no' while the answer to whether the [native] Taiwanese are our distant cousins is 'yes'.
Thanks for you inputs, Cathy, CVJ. Couldn't access Malig's post, though. (Why is that blog not on my link list. Aargh, the customization affected my original links template!!!)
resty,
there's a growing acceptance that ancestors of Filipinos really came from Taiwan not from Borneo.
that the migration theory is false
don't remember where I read it but probably in one of my yahoogroups
yes, rice terraces not only in the pilipins. even bali, i've read somewhere, have them.
Talaga?
>>there's a growing acceptance that ancestors of Filipinos really came from Taiwan not from Borneo.
>>>that the migration theory is false
oh i just had a ball reading this site.
http://writingthirty.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_archive.html
will link it shortly :)
there was an episode in mummy road show (national geographic) when they went to examine the cave mummies of the Philippines, and one of the professor/host mention that they saw inca bone in the phil. mummy. that made me curious, they must be related! if you will look at the world map, rp and peru is bounded by the pacific ocean, this is just my crazy thought - it's either, our lands wasn't apart then or either w/c tribesmen traveled either ways??? notice the clothing, the weaving and how they offer animal/human to their gods, the terraces, and they look w/ much likeness. not sure if anyone have seen the journey of man in discovery channel before, but what they've discovered is that the redskins/american indians are relatives of the nomads of siberia, so it's possible that the igorots and the incas are related. i wish to know more about the relation of inca-igorot.
found my way again here from bill bilig...i don't know if you've seen the genome mapping project of NGC but it traced the ancestry of all modern men, thru DNA sampling, to a man from Africa, who traveled to Asia, Europe and Siberia. If you read more about austronesians, you'll realized even people from madagascar are related to Filipinos.
recent evidence traced austronesians from formosa then phillies before spreading to madagascar,malaysia, indonesia, may e as far as california
Resty, thanks for the heads up. I've posted about this in my blog:
http://cvjugo.blogspot.com/2007/10/pre-hispanic-philippines-patrilineal.html
Africa was part of the great Atlantis, a civilization that used voodoo or black magic extensively to its very end.
There are two theories expounding on the physical evidence on the DNA thing from Africa: 1) First, the Atlantis thing, 2) Second, that one forwarded by Zecharia Sitchin in his book "The 12th Planet".
By the way, UP Diliman will be holding an international conference about "The Sunken Civilizations," Sept. this year.
And what, may I ask, does Sitchin's theory say?
[Hi, ExpectoRant:
Could you put the ff in lieu of the first comment that I posted earlier? Delete na lang the earlier version. Thanks.]
Geologists' ancient maps say that the Philippine Cordillera was under water for many centuries. That's how scientists partly explain the kind of rock formations in the area, like Sagada for instance.
In my esoteric readings though, author and mystic Harold Klemp said that the rice terraces were part of the peaks of an old continent that sank into the depths of the Pacific Ocean millions of years ago.
That incident has been recorded in many cultures as "The Great Flood."
So that implies that the Philippine Rice Terraces are older than 2,000 years contrary to what history books say.
Complicating this bit of info morevoer is that-- this continent, does not correspond to any geological ages established so far by scientist.
It has been said that the Igorots, as narrated in their oral literature, are one of the few peoples in the world who do not trace their origin from the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel. Some Chinese tribes trace their roots from the latter.
The Igorots have no stories about migration and things of the sort. They trace their origins from the gods, which well...needs more than history to explain.
It could be more esoteric than what we are capable of believing, really.
Sitchin has written a series of books on the matter, go grab then at NBS if you can. It would be difficult to simplify him here.
His theories can be ticklish and outlandish -- "ET-ish," I might say -- and one of my teachers countered it by saying: "There is such as thing as parallel histories."
The current prevailing theory is that all Malayo-Polynesians (the Polynesians are said to have originally branched out from a group in the Sundanese islands in Indonesia) all branched out from a source population that originally came from all around the Philippines, who came from the Babuyan and Batanes Islands having come from Taiwan, where the largest variety of extant Austronesian language families are found.
In turn, it is speculated that the Formosan tribes who are ultimately considered to be the source of all other Malayo-Polynesian groups, were originally descended from groups that once existed in the Southern Part of China.
Unfortunately, the original tribes from the Southern Part of China who probably were culturally and physically similar to the Formosan aboriginals, especially those in Fujian Province and Guangdong Province got culturally assimilated into the Han Chinese culture of the newer migrants who poured in from Central China after the Han and Tang dynasties respectively.
What remains of the previous existence of these original ancestors of the Austronesians in Taiwan (and of all Malayo-Polynesians) in Southern China is that fact that some Southern Chinese occassionally have some facial features that make some of them them seem similar to Southeast Asians and Filipinos. These features sometimes emerge RECESSIVELY so that in some Filipino-Chinese families of pure Fujianese descent with no mixture of Filipino ancestry whatsoever occassionally have one child out of four or 2 out of 5 who sometimes pass off as being Filipinos and don't look very Chinese. (Their classmates in some Chinese schools would tease them as "huanabin" - meaning "Filipino face")
Linguistically and culturally, the Formosan mountain tribes are very much related to most Filipinos, and most closely to the Ivatans, Babuyans, as well as most Cordillerans. It is thus no surprise that they would have similar facial features.
(continued)
(continuation)
The practice of terrace farming, would thus most probably have come from a common source that once existed in the Asian Mainland in what is now known as Southern China, except that those people who would have been descendants of those original people related to the Formosan Tribes as well as all Austronesians and Malayo-Polynesians had already been absorbed into becoming culturally and racially intermixed with the more recently arrived Han Chinese.
On the other hand, the lighter-skinned complexion of many of the groups in the Cordilleras, save for the observation on the Ifugaos, may point to the possibility, thus, that perhaps the "browner" variety of Filipinos (including the Ifugaos), indigenous Malaysians, Indonesians, and Polynesians might possibly be the result of early population mergers and mixtures of the much earlier Negrito inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago.
It appears that Taiwan might not have had any Negritos and as such, the Formosan Tribes thus seem to be of a somewhat unmixed "yellow" stock (albeit different from the Northern Asian stock), and perhaps this may also be the origin of most of the yellow-skinned, almond-eyed Cordilleran groups, except for the Ifugaos.
Perhaps, the Ifugaos - as with the rest of the lowland Filipinos - were the results of such a "Austronesian + Negrito" population merger (albeit with a higher percentage in favor of the Austronesian side perhaps like 85% Austronesian + 15% Negrito), the Negrito side thus contributing the darker skin tone as well as other features that caused many Malayo-Polynesians to end up having other features that make them look physically different from the Formosan highlanders.
It could - perhaps - be that the situation is analogous to the conquest of the Indian Subcontent by the Aryans of the North who were Caucasoids coming from present-day Iran and Afghanistan and domination of the indigenous Dravidians, which resulted in the creation of the caste system, and resulted in the varied physical appearances of contemporary Indians from very dark (unmixed Dravidian), to brown skinned (mixed Aryan and Dravidian) to pure Caucasian white (pure Aryan).
(continued)
(continuation)
In fact, in the chronicles of Pigafetta, the descriptions of some of the native Filipinos they encountered in the Visayas revealed that there were many, especially among the upper-class women from the Datu class, who were light-skinned, and apparently the description used was that "they were as fair-skinned as our women" (meaning Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian women).
Interestingly, the same situation of "population mixing" is evident in Japan, whereby the Japanese are evidently seen to be the result of mixing between two main groups who later merged: the older Jomon groups (very hairy, having somewhat Caucasoid "round-eyed" features who are most exemplified by the modern Ainu and the modern Okinawans) and the Yayoi, who, when compared to the Jomon are relatively hairless (as far as body and facial hair is concerned) and almond-eyed and resembled modern Koreans and Mongolians. Most ordinary Japanese are a 80% Yayoi (evident in their almond eyes), 20% Jomon mix (evident in the hairyness of the males as well as the occasional emergence of somewhat "Caucasoid" facial features).
The least mixed among the Jomons are the Ainus of Hokkaido and the Okinawans, while the least mixed among the modern Japanese who are closest to the Yayoi, are the Japanese from Kyushu island who look very Korean, while the more Northeast one goes, people tend to start having more Jomon or "Caucasoid-like" features.
In short, I'm theorizing that the Malayo-Polynesian populations of the Philippines, Indonesia, and modern-day Malaysia might have long, long ago descended from a merging of earlier Negrito as well as later waves of Austronesian migrants resembling the modern-day Formosan highland aborigines of Taiwan. The unmixed extant populations of these are thus the scattered Negrito groups (aetas, dumagats, atis) while from the unmixed Austronesian side, those are the almond-eyed, lighter-skinned Cordillerans.
It is only in India, however, that the manner by which population mixing was most clearly delineated, classified, and "formalized" through the caste system.
Ultimately, population mixing is the inevitable result of population contact through migration and conquest, and subjugation and domination.
Orion, interesting observations! Thanks!
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