The type of man that went out of Africa at 75000-80000 years ago had developed as early as 100000 years ago (one hundred thousand) and a few earlier forerunners of the type had already ventured out and into the Near East as the Skhul and Qafzeh men found in Palestine (and they were represented in Omo in Ethiopia before the breakout) There was an older type that was in place in Southern Asia before the big explosion of Toba and which came back to fill in the gap after the explosion, returning from some places of refuge. I assume this means the highland areas including the Himalayas.
The older wave had integrated with the Neanderthals and had interbred more readily with them: it is probably not going too far in saying that they were of a more peaceful nature. The newer wave engulfed the survivors and absorbed them. In Africa the new wave out had left some skulls and skeletons which were called "Australoid", the resemblance to Australian Aboriginals being a matter of some curiousity. At the time in Africa there were several strains of people of unusually large size. The ancestors of the Bushmen included men of large stature, including with enormous skulls. The large "Australoids" Out Of Africa absorbed the Skhul crossbreeds and pushed on.
African Eve, cover of Newsweek magazine
At any rate, the members of this wave which settled in India looked very much like their descendants, the Southern Indians, except they were very much larger in size on the average. There was a very distinctive Tamil look to them which is also evident in many of the Australian Aboriginals.
And so the Floor-level Sundalanders were analogous to the European Cro-Magnons in their stature, but ethnically distinctive, being more specifically more like their descendants in Southern Asia and Australia. Boule in his book Fossil Men speaks of the burials found in Hoabinhian and Bacsonian shellmounds and makes note of this unusual feature. These were the actual "Lemurians"
Many of the people were still reminiscent of their African Ancestry, and this did include Pygmies. To this day the Papuans and Melanesians have a strongly "African" look (Australians illustrated)
As far as the Australian fossil skulls go, there were two obviously distinctive lines: one with mouch rougher and more rugged skulls, with retreating brows, heavier brow ridges, thicker bones and bigger teeth, and then the more refined type with more rounded skulls and larger brains. The more rugged type (Noticeable all the way back into Omo in Ethiopia at perhaps 100000 years ago) indicates more admixtuyre with the earlier "Archaic" types of peoples. But it is a dustinctive type from only being Neanderthaloid: rather, it contains the distinctive type of vatious mixings with different original populations (Theresa Driusin points out that these mixes are almost invariably new males on native females and can be considered forced matings as a rule)
One of the unusual features (Evidently introdued later fom overseas and implying continued connections to the larger world system) is that some of the skulls towad the end of the Ice Age are artificially deformed. In more recent times, this is evidently a mark of distinction in an elite class
The two forms of skull above: the archaic type is long and low and the deformed sulls are short and high. In this case there is a distinctive raising of the floor of the braincase in back,
which is seen also in later skulls from Japan (especially)
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| Cross sections for the deformed skulls of Australia |
The deformed-skull Lemurians of Sundaland, evidently representing an elite class: Such deformed skulls are also known in Southeast Asia and Indonesia/Sundaland at an age contemporaneous to the Australian examples.