Mbabaram people

This puzzle contributed to the Barrinean hypothesis, which regarded the Mbabaram people as a reclusive rainforest remnant of an original Negrito[clarification needed] population.

[1][6] Both Norman Tindale and Robert Dixon suggest that at some period in the past, the Mbabaram had moved from or been driven out of the rainforest, westwards into scrubland.

[1] Following reports that tin lay in their district, Willie Jack and John Newell prospected the area and discovered a payable lode Prospectors Gully in 1880.

By the time he began his fieldwork in the mid 1960s, he found that mining and the destruction of their rainforest "had ensured that the Mbabaram tribe had dropped... to three old tired men".

[8] In a publication of 1941, Norman Tindale, together with the American anthropologist Joseph Birdsell, published a paper suggesting that there were 12 Negrito tribes living on the coastal and rainforest areas around Cairns.

They thought they could identify 8 characteristics shared by the Mbabaram with the other rainforest tribes: A trihybrid thesis had been advanced in the late 19th century redolent of early ideas concerning supposed pure racial types,[9] which posited that Australia had been populated by 3 successive waves of peoples.

[2] In 2002, it was revived when Keith Windschuttle and Tom Gittin accused modern scholars in Australia of having suppressed the evidence, partially to cater to the feelings of Aboriginal activists disturbed (according to them[verification needed]) by the idea that, given successive waves of "invasion", their claims to native title might suffer from a hierarchy of claims, according to which tribes descended from which hypothetical ancestor of the three.