Beyond racism - February 13, 2005

I refer to the letter by Dr Pierre Schembri Wismayer (The Sunday Times, January 30).

While there is general agreement among anthropologists that all the races of modern man evolved from a preceding primitive human, Homo erectus, there is dispute about how this evolution came about.

One theory, the 'Regional Continuity Theory' is that as Homo erectus spread over Africa and Eurasia, separate populations gradually evolved in response to selection for adaptation to the demands of their different environments into the different races. The races still remained one species because genes continued to be exchanged between the different populations and no reproductive barrier arose.

The separate populations of Homo erectus evolved by parallel evolution those characteristics by which we recognise modern Homo sapiens, especially the enlarged brain and the less robust skeleton.

According to this theory, Homo sapiens evolved from several stems of Homo erectus in different areas of the earth (polyphyletic evolution).

The other main theory, the 'Out of Africa Theory', maintains that Homo sapiens evolved from a population of Homo erectus in only one place, viz., Africa, and then spread out as Homo sapiens into Europe, Asia and Australia (monophyletic evolution). In these different environments, distinctive racial characteristics evolved.

Excavations in Siberia prove that the most ancient centres of civilisation that is, the central lands of the continent, were the cradle of Euro-Asian mankind. Prehistoric sites in Siberia and Russia are identical to those found in Malta, here, in the centre of the Mediterranean. One such prehistoric site in Siberia is actually called the Malta Settlement.

The first inhabitants of these islands must have been the Aryans, the builders. Our magnificent temples at Mnajdra and elsewhere testify to this. The islanders must have spoken an Indo-European tongue.

With the total disappearance of the Ice Age, certain biological changes did start to creep into the proto-Nordic race. In southern and central Europe, a process of an increasing head breadth began to develop, which eventually resulted in the Alpine race.

In the 1920s the well known British anthropologist L.H Dudley Buxton studied Maltese ethnicity. He proved conclusively that the Maltese are ethnically European, of the Eastern Alpine type, who settled here around 2500 BC during the Bronze Age. These were certainly Indo-Europeans, pre-Doric, the battle-axe people.

In this context it is relevant to note the findings of Dr Wyatt, an expert on poliomyelitis, as reported in the Times of Malta of July 23, 1992. Dr Wyatt found that although the climate in Malta was similar to that of the Middle East, the disease affected its Maltese victims in the same way as it affected Europeans and North Americans. It was quite different from symptoms found in Middle Eastern and African patients.

I agree with Dr Schembri Wismayer that Maltese is fundamentally a Semitic language. Unlike other Semitic languages, however, it is written in the Latin alphabet, but with the addition of special characters to accommodate certain Semitic sounds. It would not be fair, however, to stop here. For there is much in the Maltese language today that is not Semitic, due to the immeasurable Romantce influence from our succession of (southern) European rulers through the ages.

I also agree with Dr Schembri Wismayer that more in-bred a population is, the more unhealthy it is, in genetic terms. It is a fact that members of the same tribe who breed only among themselves are subject to specific diseases. It is also true that through the ages there was an inter-breeding with our rulers, as he stated. But he must keep in mind that after the Arab period our interbreeding was mainly within the European genetic framework.

As he knows quite well, breeding with Africans is almost totally absent. An imminent breeding with Africans can produce a drastic change in the genetic framework of our offspring. Therefore, it is much wiser, in genetic terms, that in the near future we inter-breed with others of a nearby genetic framework.