Long before the Vietnamese language existed, and long before there was a culture that we can identify as Việt, the genes that today exist in the bodies of Vietnamese started to appear in the area of what is now Vietnam.
This is the first origin that we will investigate. However, it will take several posts to explain, as it is a complex topic. The gist of the problem is that there is a lot of flawed scholarship that has been produced about this topic. What we need to first determine is which scholarship is flawed and why.
The first people to try to develop a story about the biological origins of the Vietnamese and the other ethnic groups that currently live in the territory of Vietnam were French scholars, and they did so when Vietnam was under French colonial rule.
Two well-known scholars who engaged in this work were (self-taught) archaeologists Madeleine Colani and Henry Mansuy. In the 1920s and 1930s, Colani and Mansuy discovered various skulls and skeletal remains, and they classified them in terms of race.
In particular, they identified the skeletal remains of races that they referred to as Mélanésiens, Indonésiens, Négritos, Australoïdes, Mongoloïdes, as well as mixtures (métissage) between some of these races.
How did they know which race the skeletal remains they found belonged to? Their main technique was to measure the skull, a technique that was part of a field of science known as craniometry (or more broadly known as cephalometry).
To determine what race a skull belonged to, scholars who engaged in craniometry measured something called the “cephalic index” (the width of the skull multiplied by 100 and then divided by the length of the skull).
After calculating the cephalic index of a skull, it would then be categorized as dolichocephalic (long-headed), mesaticephalic (medium-headed), or brachycephalic (short-headed). These divisions were then used to differentiate different races.
This is what Colani and Mansuy did in the 1920s and 1930s.
Further, we can see from their scholarship that they believed that 1) there are distinct human races, 2) that humans have historically migrated from one place to another, and 3) that new races emerge through interbreeding.
They thus classified the skeletal remains that they found by race, and sought to explain the existence of different races in the past by referring to ancient migrations and episodes of interbreeding.
As one today might be able to guess, this technique of dividing humans into races based on their cephalic index was not entirely scientific. Indeed, this approach was seriously called into question in the early twentieth century when anthropologist Franz Boas demonstrated that the cephalic index of the children of immigrants to the United States changed in one generation, thereby demonstrating that the shape of the skull can be significantly altered by a change in environment (and diet).
A more significant challenge to this technique, however, came in the 1930s and 1940s from the work of evolutionary biologists who developed complex ideas about how living things change over time.
Known as “the modern synthesis” or “the evolutionary synthesis,” evolutionary biologists combined together Charles Darwin’s idea of natural selection with ideas about how traits are inherited that had been developed by Gregor Mendel.
More specifically, what evolutionary biologists discovered is that there were multiple ways that human beings evolved: genetic drift, gene flow, mutation pressure, and natural selection. Of these four forces of evolutionary change, only one of them involves interbreeding (gene flow).
The modern synthesis, and the earlier work by Franz Boas, demonstrated that the approach of scholars like Colani and Mansuy was extremely simplistic, and therefore, was inadequate for explaining the past.
Recognizing this fact, in 1951, American physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn published an extremely influential article entitled “The New Physical Anthropology.”
In this article, Washburn argued that following the modern synthesis, physical anthropologists (and this includes scholars who worked in craniometry) needed to change their approach to research.
He stated that “In the past, physical anthropology has been considered primarily as a technique. Training consisted in learning to take carefully defined measurements and in computing indices and statistics.”
Washburn stated further of physical anthropology that its “dominant attitude may be described as static, with emphasis on classification based on types. Any such characterization is oversimplified.”
It was oversimplified because prior to the modern synthesis, physical anthropologists did not understand the range of factors that led to evolutionary change. Therefore, when Colani and Mansuy discovered a skull that looked different from others that they had found, the only way that they could account for its difference was by referring to either migration or interbreeding.
They did not know that physical changes can come about by other means as well, such as genetic mutations and genetic drift.
This means that their classification of skulls as belonging to different races was also problematic. Indeed, Washburn also stated in his article that “races which can not be reconciled with genetics should be removed from consideration” (299). What he meant by this is that when one considers all of the evolutionary factors that affect human beings, it becomes extremely difficult to divide them into races.
Not surprisingly, in the 70 years since Washburn published this article, Western scholars have moved away from trying to identify distinct races or ethnic groups in antiquity.
What they began to do is to look at “populations” more generally, and to try to determine the biological relatedness of ancient remains. However, they did not attempt to categorize those ancient remains according to race.
Further, scholars began to use much more sophisticated techniques of statistical analysis known as “multivariate analysis.”
The first scholar (as far as I know) to produce a work based on multivariate analysis that included data from Vietnam was University of Hawaii Professor Michael Pietrusewsky. In 1974, Pietrusewsky published an article entitled “Neolithic Populations of Southeast Asia Studied by Multivariate Craniometric Analysis” [Homo Vol. 25, No. (1974): 207-230].
As Pietrusewsky noted in the introduction to this article, the earlier work of scholars like Colani and Mansuy was based on “generally unacceptable methods,” and he sought in this article to “reassess the biological characteristics and affinities of Neolithic populations from Southeast Asia through the application of modern statistical procedures.” (208)
In this work, Pietrusewsky did not categorize Neolithic populations into races. He simply noted the geographical location where remains were from and calculated the biological relatedness of those remains.
The advances that were made in the 1950s-1970s in the field of physical anthropology in the English-speaking world were ones that Vietnamese scholars did not participate in.
Instead, during that same time period, the Vietnamese scholars who work on this issue continued to produce scholarship that followed the “generally unacceptable methods” that we find in the work of Colani and Mansuy from the 1920s and 1930s.
That is the topic we will look at next.
