APPENDIX I

Now when anthropologists meet with a people who
exhibit mixed characters they are apt to at once presume
that such a people is of hybrid origin. The mere fact that
Armenoid traits occur in the natives of South Arabia gives
support to such an interpretation. We have still, even while
admitting an Armenoid admixture, to explain the hamitic
traits we find in the south.

We shall now proceed to develop a new theory which
helps us to understand why the people of South Arabia
should resemble adjacent natives of Africa on the one hand
and those of India on the other. We have also to account
for the Armenoid traits. The new data placed at our dis-
posal by Captain Thomas's daring expeditions into
unknown territory lend support to the theory which we
are now to put forward.

The enigma of modern anthropology is the Black Belt of
mankind. It commences in Africa and peters out amongst
the natives of the Melanesian Islands of the Pacific. At each
extremity of the belt, in Africa as in Melanesia, we find
peoples with black skins, woolly hair, more or less beardless,
prognathous and long-headed. We cannot suppose these
negro peoples, although now widely separated, have been
evolved independently of each other. We therefore suppose
that at one time a proto-negroid belt crossed the ancient
world, occupying all intermediate lands, Arabia, Baluchi-
stan, India, Further India, the Philippines and Malay
Archipelago. We further suppose that intermediate parts of
the proto-negroid belt became transformed, giving rise to
the hamitic peoples of Africa and to their cousins the
Dravidian and brown-skinned peoples of India. On our
theory, the Arabian Peninsula was at one time occupied by
a people intermediate to the Somalis on the one hand and