On the Nature of Mankind

Chapter 14 provides an account of the creation of the first human couple, Mašyā and Mašyāne. The chapter also provides a genealogy of their offspring, the progenitors of the races of mankind as well as of monstrous and mythical peoples. Two additional sections focus on “others”: women and monkeys and bears.

Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de (1707–88)

Both as a scientist and as a writer, Buffon was one of the most highly esteemed figures of the European Enlightenment. In depicting the perpetual flux of the dynamic forces of Nature, he portrayed the varieties of animal and vegetable species as subject to continual change, in contrast with Linnaeus, whose system of classification based on physical descriptions alone appeared timeless. But Buffon’s definition of a species in terms of procreative power excluded the evolutionary hypothesis that any species could become transformed into another. Hybrids, as imperfect copies of their prototypes, were in his scheme ultimately destined to become sterile rather than to generate fresh species. By virtue of the same definition, he judged that the different races of mankind formed family members of a single species, since the mating of humans of all varieties was equally fertile.

Distribution of Races: A Brief Overview

Races of mankind human being living on our planet all belong to the same species. However, varying geographical conditions and climate have resulted in the evolution of different groups called races. It is believed that all people originally came from one common ancestral type but the various groups now have distinct and characteristic differences. However we should not think of racial differences has been hard and fast because the races open overlap and there is no such thing as a pure race.

Linguistic Groups

An old-fashioned somatological analysis of the racial composition of the present-day populations of Northeast India suggested that this area was home to two major races of mankind, the Caucasoid and the Mongoloid, and modern population genetic studies now provide us with an even more fine-meshed and complex view of population prehistory. Close proximity of these populations in terms of settlements has led to exchange of genes between the two groups. This chapter provides a detailed account of the linguistic situation in Northeast India, which is relevant to our understanding of the prehistoric dispersals of linguistic groups. Various linguistic hypotheses and feasible archaeological links are discussed in this chapter. Probable routes of migration are also discussed on the basis of linguistic, ethnographical, historical, and folkloristic data.