Purest Pygmies

The two students at the University of the Philippines told their zoology professor, Tage U. H. Ellinger, a tall tale. Deep in the Zambales Mountains in Luzon, where they had hidden during the Japanese invasion, were a strange, small people who called themselves Abenlens. Unlike the Negritos of the region, the Pygmies were only 4 1/2 feet tall and were light brown, almost "blond" in complexion.

It was just the sort of tale to send Danish-born Dr. Ellinger hotfooting it to the hills. For years he has been spending all his spare time studying Philippine natives, trying to find "what's underneath when you take off Spanish and American varnish." The Abenlens sounded as unvarnished as any people in the Islands.

Hunters & Bali Girls. In the late fall Dr. Ellinger organized his first Abenlen expedition, but came back to his classes emptyhanded. At Christmas time he tried again. Leaving his Igorot wife behind in Bontoc, he traveled with a photographer and an experienced guerrilla to the outskirts of a small village in the Zambales foothills. There he found a family of Abenlens. All 15 of them were living in a single grass hut eight feet square.

The olive-skinned Pygmies, said Dr. Ellinger last week, speak the Negrito dialect, but also have a language of their own which neither he nor his guides could understand. The little men have finer features than the Negritos and unfrizzed, wavy hair. The women could pass for miniature Indonesians; their light-brown eyes and graceful limbs give them the appearance of tiny Balinese girls.

Since his small group was isolated from their tribe, Dr. Ellinger could not study the Abenlens' culture. But it was clear that they are great hunters. They carried hefty spears, and their long arrows were tipped with broad iron heads for killing wild pig. Other arrowheads were hooked and pronged for birds or fish.

Blood Lines & Appetite. The Abenlens, says Dr. Ellinger, are among the last remnants of a race that crossed a land bridge from Southeast Asia 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. They are reserved and antisocial, and may never have intermarried with their neighbors. They are still pagan, illiterate and rumored to be cannibals who make drinking cups from human skulls and eat the hearts and livers of their victims.

Even so, Dr. Ellinger thought it would be a good idea if one of the younger women came to Manila so that he could study her language. Unafraid of her exotic appetite, he gave up the idea only when he learned her price: 50 pesos plus his hand in marriage.

Other Philippine experts, notably famed Anthropologist H. Otley Beyer, doubt the purity of the Abenlens. Beyer believes they probably came from Borneo or the Celebes during Mesolithic times, some 15,000 years later than the Negritos but too long ago to have kept their blood lines pure.

Ellinger himself has no doubts at all about the importance of his find. He has leave from his university and is going back to the Zambales to hunt more "unvarnished" Filipinos. "Nobody would believe me before I came back," he exulted last week. "But now I know they are real. I believe I have found the real group, and am convinced the rest exist."

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