After a few mornings my attention was arrested by a shouting in the camp, and I learned that Mohammed had surprised one of the Pygmies in attendance upon the King, and was conveying him, in spite of strenuous resistance, straight to my tent. I looked up, and there, sure enough, was the strange little creature, perched upon Mohammed’s right shoulder, nervously hugging his head, and casting glances of alarm in every direction. Mohammed soon deposited him in the seat of honour. A royal interpreter was stationed at his side. Thus, at last, was I able veritably to feast my eyes upon a living embodiment of the myths of some thousand years!
The writer’s name was George August Schweinfurth, a Riga-born botanist and traveller; the pygmy’s name was Akadimoo. They met in 1870 on the banks of the Uele River in what is now the northernmost province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Akadimoo should not have existed. By the time Schweinfurth came across him the notion that there was, buried somewhere in the dark heart of Africa, a race of very small people had long been dismissed as the fancies of Greek mythographers. ‘The Trojans filled the air with clamour, like the cranes that fly from the onset of winter and sudden rains and make for the Ocean Stream with raucous cries to bring sudden death to the Pigmies,’ wrote Homer. Later authors wrote about a pygmy queen named Genara who had, for her beauty and her vanity, been transformed into a crane by a jealous goddess and set against her own people.
The war of the pygmies, the Geranomachia as the Greeks called it, is an engaging story, and one that endured for millennia. Pliny repeats and embroiders it; he places the pygmies in Thrace, Asia Minor, India, Ethiopia and at the source of the Nile, and cannot resist adding that they rode into battle on the backs of goats and were only seventy-three centimetres (two feet four inches) tall. Puzzled medieval scholastics wondered if people so small could be human, and concluded that they could not. As late as 1716 Joseph Addison wrote twenty-three Latin verses entitled The Battle of the Pygmies and the Cranes. Along with them he published two other Latin poems in praise of the barometer and the bowling ball. In his essay on Addison, Dr Johnson comments that some subjects are best not written about in English.
Addison’s poem was the last flourish of the Homeric tradition. By the late 1600s, the hardheaded men of the Royal Society were testing legend against empirical evidence and finding it wanting. In 1699 Edward Tyson wrote a pamphlet to prove that a putative pygmy corpse he had dissected was not human. He was right, as it happens, for his pygmy was a chimpanzee. Tyson then went on to write a scathing commentary in which he pointed out that though the inhabited world was well known, no race of little men had been found; the pygmies, as well as the cynocephali (dog-headed men) and satyrs of the Greeks, were merely garbled stories about African apes.
Tyson’s reasoning was clear and his intentions admirable, but he overestimated the extent of the world that was actually known. He also failed to consider that Homer’s lovely simile might have been concrete knowledge transmuted. Homer certainly knew that the storks that can still be seen nesting in Greek villages in late summer, winter each year in Africa. The inference that his pygmies must live there too is plain. He was also probably remembering something distantly learned from the Egyptians. Almost a thousand years before Homer lived, Pepy II of the sixth dynasty had written to one of his generals urging him to look after a pygmy found in an expedition to the Southern Forests.
Akadimoo, the first modern pygmy, belonged to a people called the ‘Aka’ – a name by which they are still known. The Aka are only one of a rather heterogeneous collection of shortish peoples who live in the African forest between the parallels 4° North and South. If a pygmy is defined as any member of a group with an average adult male height of less than 150 centimetres (four feet ten inches), then Africa has about a hundred thousand of them. The shortest are the Efe of the Ituri forest; their men are only 142 centimetres (four feet eight inches), their women 135 centimetres (four feet five inches). They are thought to have been there long before the invasion of the taller Bantu from the north-west about two thousand years ago.
The French anthropologist Armand de Quatrefages thought that African pygmies are the remnants of a small, dark, frizzy-haired and steatopygous people who once occupied much of the globe. This is not a ridiculous idea. In the islands of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea there are groups of people who are almost physically indistinguishable from African pygmies. These are the ‘negritos’ who have been a shadowy presence in anthropology ever since the Spanish first encountered them when settling the interior of Luzon Island in the Philippines archipelago. Recent genetic studies suggest that the negritos are ancient: that they were the first Palaeolithic colonists of Asia. Like the rest of humanity, they came from Africa, but they are not especially closely related to Africans, much less African pygmies. They may have evolved smallness quite independently.
Theories about the cause of pygmy shortness long antedate sure knowledge of their existence. The Geranomachia was a favourite theme of Attic artists, who knew only two things about pygmies: that they were short and that they did not like cranes. A red-figure rhyton from the Classical period therefore shows an achondroplastic dwarf clubbing a bird. The diagnosis of achondroplasia is unambiguous – the limbs of the bird’s assailant are short and bowed, yet his torso, head and genitals are of normal size. Pompeii has yielded a fresco, now in the Naples Museum, in which bands of pygmies hunt crocodiles while others are consumed by hippos, and yet others copulate energetically on the banks of the Nile. These Roman pygmies are not deformed, but rather have the large heads and spindly limbs of emaciated three- or four-year-old children. The oddness of these images is perfectly excusable, since none of the artists had ever seen a pygmy; they were depicting the fabulous by appealing to the familiar. More surprisingly, as recently as 1960 a leading anthropologist and expert on pygmies asserted that they are small because of an achondroplastic mutation. Little is known about what makes pygmies short, but this is certainly wrong.
That pygmy proportions are not the result of any known pathology is clear from the skeleton collected by Emin Pasha. It shows that pygmies have limbs that are beautifully proportioned, but that differ from those of taller people in subtle ways. The action of natural selection over the course of tens of thousands of years has made a form more gently sculpted than the dramatic mutations familiar to the clinical geneticist. Studies of children fathered by tall African farmers on pygmy women suggest that pygmy smallness is probably not due to a single mutation, since the children have a height intermediate to that of the parents. So several genes are probably responsible for pygmy shortness. We do not know what these genes are, but we do have some idea of what they do. Careful measurements of pygmies (and thousands of them have been measured) show that compared to taller people, pygmies have relatively short legs but relatively long arms. They also have heads and teeth that are relatively large for their torsos. They have, in fact, not only the height, but also the linear proportions of an eleven-year-old British child.