Stone Age Relics

There is only one group of white people on earth who have persisted almost unchanged from the Stone Age; will they survive World War II? The odds that they will are not too good, for they live on one of the main military highways.

The Ainu (popularly known as the hairy Ainu), some 16,000 of them, inhabit northern islands of Japan. A few live on the half-Soviet island of Sakhalin. How they got there is one of anthropology's darkest mysteries. Last week the Smithsonian Institution reported to the U.S. the findings of Russian Anthropologist Lev Yakolevich Sternberg.

Said the Smithsonian: Ainu women, properly dressed, could stroll unnoticed along any U.S. Main Street. Ainu men are hairy and large-headed, with faces strikingly like those of Leo Tolstoy, Alfred Tennyson, or Orson Welles. The almost beardless Japanese point to the Ainus' hirsuteness as evidence of subhuman status.

Most scientists agree that the Ainus are relics of an early Caucasian or "proto-Nordic" stock, somewhat less evolved than modern Western man. Anthropologist Sternberg suspects that many thousands of years ago the Ainus migrated to Japan via more southerly islands--perhaps the Philippines, the Moluccas, Oceania. His evidence is that the Ainus, unlike any other tribes in northern Asia:

> Wear loincloths in summer.

> Make dugout canoes like those of Pacific islanders.

> Use simple bows and fancy war clubs like those of the Austronesians, fork-headed arrows like those of the Philippine aborigines.

> Weave cloth (an art unknown among Siberian primitives) on a loom much like that of the Polynesians.

But one of their customs is pure Ainu: To raise and nourish bear cubs intended for religious sacrifice, Ainu women suckle them. This sacrificial throat-cutting is supposed to release divine spirits.

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