Giants From the Dreamtime the Yowie In Myth And Reality

North Queensland 1939

Lost Pgymy Tribes

1939 Professor Joseph Birdsell from Harvard University and Australian anthropologist Norman B Tindale of the South Australian Museum, carried out a detailed anthropometric survey of some 600 north Qld rainforest pygmies.

During this period, they stumbled upon a whole tribe hidden deep in the Atherton jungles that had hitherto been unknown. For a while both men thought that these people were the last traces of negritos who had arrived in Australia long before the Aborigines.

However, a series of studies of the language, blood types, teeth structure and tribal boundaries has disproved this theory. Having seen the vast, taipan-infested jungles of northern Qld during our many field expeditions, my wife Heather and I can easily accept the possible existence of lost pygmy tribes hereabouts. In that wild country any number of these tribes could wander unseen.

Many remote parts of Australia are not fully explored, areas so inaccessible that tales of 'lost tribes' should not be dismissed out of hand. After all, there were still unknown Aboriginals living in remote areas of Central Australia until comparatively recent times, when Europeans first ventured into their area.

And it was only about 70 years ago that an Aboriginal was found in the Bulloo Channels country of north-western NSW, who had never seen a white man before.