p Melanesia Land is what scholars call the large continent assumed to have existed in the SouthWest Pacific until the middle of the Tertiary period. After that it began to sink and continued to sink until only recently. Evidences of this are the underwater ridge connecting New Guinea with the New Britain Island; traces of the subsidence of the sea floor in the area of the Solomon Islands and the Loyalty coral islands near New Caledonia; and New Caledonia itself, the visible part of a vast underwater ridge. The Fiji Islands, at the eastern edge of Melanesia, are the result of violent geological activity that continued into the Quaternary period; they alternately sank and rose high above the surface.

p Geologically, Melanesia Land existed comparatively recently. Did it sink in the period 115 when man had begun to settle in Oceania? The science of philology provides us with a positive answer.

p The more than 1,000 languages and dialects spoken in Oceania fall into two large groups. The first group, including the Polynesian, Micronesian and Melanesian languages, belongs to the great Austronesian family mentioned earlier. The second is called the Papuan group, although people of other islands besides the Papuans of New Guinea speak them.

p The Austronesians invented the catamaran, a raft consisting of two or more logs lashed together, on which they voyaged over two oceans and spread from Madagascar to Easter Island. The invention was evidently made in Indonesia, the homeland of the Austronesians. It wag adopted by some of the dark-skinned inhabitants of Melanesia, who also borrowed Austronesian languages in place of their Papuan languages. (There are other instances in history of similar borrowings.) But there are still places in Melanesia where non-Austronesian languages are spoken. Papuan languages are spoken not only on New Guinea, by the majority of the population, but also on the Admiralty and New Britain islands, New Ireland Island, the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia. Papuan languages may have existed on the Fiji Islands as well; some features of the Fiji tongue indicate this, although it is a Melanesian language.

p How the Austronesians, the greatest seafarers of antiquity, reached the Oceanic islands is clear. But how did people who spoke the Papuan languages reach those islands? According to Professor Hans Damm, an authority on the Melanesian culture, the Papuans knew little about 116 navigation, which makes them essentially different from the Melanesians, Polynesians and Micronesians. They moved up and down the big rivers of New Guinea in narrow dugout canoes which they never dared to take out to sea, and would have been foolhardy to do so. The Papuans, says Professor Damm, are typically land dwellers. How, then, did they manage to reach Oceanic islands as much as hundreds of kilometres away? Perhaps in the same way as the ancestors of the Australians migrated to the fifth continent.

p Prehistoric man came to Australia long before the end of the last Ice Age, by way of New Guinea, but from there he could also have continued eastwards, to the Melanesian islands. Since there were numerous islands and islets that later sank in the coastal waters washing the islands of Melanesia, or rather, Melanesia Land, it was much easier for the Papuan-speaking tribes to people the Oceanic islands than it was for the Austronesians who voyaged eastwards several thousand years later. On their superb catamarans the Austronesians travelled far out into the Pacific. Moving eastwards much earlier than the Austronesians, the Papuan-speaking peoples were able to spread out over the ocean thanks to land bridges and islands and islets that have since disappeared.

p It is highly probable that the peopling of Oceania began very long ago. If man appeared in Australia 20,000 years ago he must have reached New Guinea still earlier. People speaking Austronesian languages came to the New Guinea area 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, says Soviet ethnographer N. Butinov. On the Fiji Islands archeologists have found traces of man that go back 4,000 years, but these are traces 117 of Austronesians, who were not the original settlers.

p We have mentioned the Negritos, dark-skinned pygmies who live in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula and the mountains of Luzon in the Philippines. Tribes of Negritos also live on New Guinea. They have no idea of navigation and could have reached the island only by land. True, New Guinea does not lie far from other islands. But small, dark people also live on the New Hebrides, which are farther away. They must have reached those islands in the same way the other pygmy tribes reached New Guinea, that is, across now vanished islands and land bridges.

p It is quite possible that the Negritos settled on the Solomons too, for legends recorded on those islands speak of undersized people with a dark skin. Similar legends are found among the Fijians, and archeologists have discovered extremely primitive tools on the Fiji Islands that could not have belonged to Austronesians.

p Linguistic data are thus confirmed by the data of other sciences dealing with man—- anthropology, ethnography, archeology and folklore. Are they confirmed by oceanography and geology, sciences dealing with nature? Only a thorough investigation of the floor of the South-West Pacific and of the numerous internal seas washing the islands and archipelagoes of Melanesia will tell us that. These seas have been hardly investigated at all either by underwater archeologists or by oceanographers, who are just beginning to probe that unusually complex region.

Modern anthropologists have shown that there is no Oceanic race as such, that all the inhabitants of Oceania belong either to the Mongoloid race or to the Negroid (Equatorial) race. Negroids 118 live for the most part in Africa. There are also Negroids in southern India. The Australians and other "Oceanic Negroids" are separated from the Africans and dark-skinned Indians by the Indian Ocean. And the Indian Ocean will perhaps some day explain why members of the Negroid race have come to be so many thousands of kilometres apart.