Download or read book Prehistory in the Pacific Islands written by John Terrell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How, asks John Terrell in this richly illustrated and original book, can we best account for the remarkable diversity of the Pacific Islanders in biology, language, and custom? Traditionally scholars have recognized a simple racial division between Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Australians, and South-east Asians: peoples allegedly differing in physical appearance, temperament, achievements, and perhaps even intelligence. Terrell shows that such simple divisions do not fit the known facts and provide little more than a crude, static picture of human diversity.