ABSTRACT
Pelras concludes that the ethnographic Toale' were irrelevant to the original peopling of South Sulawesi, but he points to Bugis tales that supposedly describe non-Bugis denizens with physical resemblances to Papuans and Australian Aborigines. The first task this paper will tackle is a brief review of the scanty published data on the skeletal biology of recent Bugis and Makasars. Before describing the human remains excavated by the Sarasins, the author shall review the archaeological evidence for a middle Holocene antiquity for the practice of shallow inhumations in South Sulawesi. On the basis of dental morphology, the authors may entertain the hypothesis that the preceramic occupants of the island arc from South Sulawesi to Okinawa, and possibly including ancient Japan, constituted a coherent population. It is immediately obvious that the South Sulawesi mandibles have typically masculine corpus heights.
