The Caroline Islands (or the Carolines - named for the Spanish King Carlos II) consists of around 500 islands located 1,900 km (1,200 mi.) east of the Philippines and south of the Marianas. It spans a wide swath with a west to east alignment, from Yap and Palau in the west to Kosrae in the east (3,500 km - 1,950 mi. long). a widely scattered archipelago of tiny islands in the western Pacific Ocean, to the north of New Guinea.
Like the Marianas, they were a Spanish possession, since their "discovery" in the 1500s, and after the Spanish-American War of 1898, they were sold by Spain to Germany. After WW I managed by Japan under a League of Nations mandate. Following WWII, the UN placed it under a U.S. mandate, and nowadays it forms part of two countries, the Republic of Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia (the links lead to Google maps of them).
They were settled some 4,000 years ago by people who had developed agriculture, and like the Marianas, the main source of population seems to be Island Southeast Asia followed by an input from Central-Eastern Micronesia (Source) a more recent genetic study from 2022 reported that five migratory streams into Micronesia. Three are East Asian related, one is Polynesian, and a fifth is a Papuan source related to mainland New Guineans that is different from the New Britain–related Papuan source for southwest Pacific populations."
In this post we will explore the "pygmies" that lived on Ponape (now known as Phonpei), little people known as Chokalai, which could probably be linked to the Marianas dwarf.
Chokalai (also "Tsokelai", "Zokelai" and "Sokele")
Google the word Chokalai, and almost all of the bibliography will point to one source: F. W. Christian's article Exploration in the Caroline Islands, published in The Geographical Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Feb., 1899), pp. 105-131. We will quote its mentions of these dwarves below:
"Ponapean traditions of their own origin are tolerably explicit. They mention first the Chokalai, or dwarf aborigines; then the Kona, or giants, otherwise called Ani-aramach, God-men or heroes, two of which, Olosipa and Olosopa, are mentioned as the builder. (p. 112)
[Then, while visiting Nantamarui at Ponial Dell, which means "over the pathway" (see spot in Google maps) Christian visited a site which was a cemetery]
Six graves were found in the lower enclosure, and three on a platform raised five feet above the level of the ground. All were little vaults not exceeding 4 or 4.5 feet in length within —roofed in with massive slabs of basalt, the graves of the fairy folk, little woodland elves, answering to our own pucks and pixies. Ethnologists would style them dwarf negritos, like the Aetas of the Philippines and the Jakou of New Guinea. These Chokalai, according to Ponapean tradition, were the little dwarfish folk who dwelt in the land before the coming of "Kona" and the "Liot," the giants and the cannibals. The two latter terms, as I have already said, probably represent respectively the Malayo Polynesian settlers and the savage Melanesians from the south. The speech of the dwarfs, it is said, was a chattering and a gibber as that of bats; they were dark of skin and flat-nosed. They are believed still to haunt the dark recesses of the forest, and are very malignant and revengeful. I was told that one man who came to this haunted dell to plant kava, was caught up and spirited away by the revengeful goblins, and his lifeless body was found many days afterwards, stretched upon a great flat rock by the seashore off Nantiati point [see on Google maps]. A curious fact concerning this primitive race was supplied me by the Au of Marau shortly before leaving Ponape. The people at the mouth of the Palang river, near the Chokach and Kiti border, [see spot on Google maps] are said to have been descended from the Chokalai, who, it seems, were not everywhere exterminated by the Malayo Polynesian conquerors. The Au's description runs thus: "In the speech of the Palang folk is a most foolish undercurrent of chatter; they are shorter in stature and their skins darker than their neighbours'; their noses are flat, and they are known throughout the tribes as the Paikop-faces. Now, the Paikop is the most ill-favoured of fishes, with wide goggle-eyes and a face as flat as a dish." Unluckily, I had no opportunity of visiting the Palang folk, though they are said to be thieving and treacherous. There seems no reason why the tale of the Au should not be true, and that we have here, overlapped and all but exterminated, the survivors of the Negrito race who made these curious little graves." (p. 124)
Christian and his group opened a grave:
"After clearing away the luxuriant undergrowth, we cautiously removed the basalt slabs at the top of each little vault, and found in the red soil within an abundant deposit of blue mould, promising good results. In the first few minutes a very minute shell adze-head was turned up, and a stone knife. No other results rewarded our efforts, save a few pieces of mouldering bones. All the rest, with the great lapse of time in a damp and hot climate, has literally melted away like sugar. Not one single red or white shell-bead was brought to light in ny of the seven graves opened, although in the central vault of Nan- Tauach we had found a very large number. The graves on the upper platform gave no better return, yielding only a few pieces of mouldering and unsubstantial bone to our most careful search, whereupon Louis shrewdly remarked that the Chokalai must have been either very stupid people who wouldn't work, or very poor and barbarous wretches, not to have any treasures to bury" (p.126)
The same text can be found "The Caroline Islands" by Christian, together with the following:
"The Ponapeans say the bow was used by the Chokalai or dwarf aborigines. The bow was made of Katiu or Ixora wood the bow string of the bark of the Hibiscus the arrows of Hibiscus wood or slips of Alek or reed grass tipped with the spine of the sting ray. Nowadays it is entirely out of use." (p. 137)
... Chokalai. The Kichin Aramach or little people the Trolls or dwarf goblins dwelling in the interior of the island. Doubtless here we have the tradition of dwarf Negrito hill tribes little by little exterminated by the early Malay settlers. (p. 382)
Below is Christian's map of the island of Ponape with some of the spots mentioned in the preceeding text.
Katharine Luomala in her work The Menehune of Polynesia and other mythical little people of Oceania (see p. 72) mentions the Chokalai, citing Christian and also Paul Hambruch, who in 1910 also visited a cemetery that with small tombs. Hambruch learned about the Chokalai, but spells the name as "Tsokelai" and "Zokelai". He recorded the local lore. Below we quote Luomala's summary citing Hambruch:
"obtained two traditions which describe the little people as small, mischievous, noisy, and thievish evil spirits, who came from a foreign land to settle in certain places on Ponape. One tradition has most of them leaving Ponape after having been punished for stealing yams ; the other has them all moving to new settlements on the island. Another reason given for their uprooting themselves was that the chief was angry with them because they made a terrific racket, singing, dancing, and banging their drums when they drank kava.
The more detailed of the two traditions obtained by Hambruch narrates that the Chokalai came from outside Ponape and settled in Kiti, a district in the southwestern part of the island. Their holy places, now called Pankatara by Ponapeans, were at Rentu village in Uono, a section of Kiti. Other settlements, made as the population increased, were Olopel, Nateuta, and a small place called Panupots. The people to settle on Ponape after the Chokalai were, according to tradition, the giants, whose ruins and graves are still pointed out... Hambruch, like Christian, regards the Chokalai as having perhaps been the aborigines of Ponape. He saw occasional individuals in Palikir who greatly differed from other Ponapeans in being short, dark, curly haired, and broad-faced, with strong prognathism and low foreheads. Eighty years ago, he states, there were people in Palan (Christian’s Palang) who were short and very dark, with high, clear voices and masses of curly hair. They were regarded as survivors of the oldest inhabitants of Ponape. Like Christian, Hambruch mentions the Jokasch (Christian’s Chokach, the district in which Palikir is located) as saying that their neighbors, the Palan people, had Paikop faces."
The full, unabriged and original version of the above text summarized by Luomala can be read online here (see pp. 101-103 in the pdf), it was written in 1936 commissioned by the editor, Thilenius, after Hambruch's untimely death in 1933, to complete the work of the Ponape 1908-1910 expedition. It also describes them:
"They looked like this: they were like people, but they were much smaller and shorter; the legs were completely tatooed. They had beautiful voices and shouted loudly for joy... They always lived under the earth; when people walked over the ground, they heard them beat their drums under the earth...when they meet people, they take possession of them and kill them. And until today they also rove around Pilap; but when it rains they creep into the earth...
This grave place, the only one which could be shown to me of the tsokelai, is not far from Nan Tamuroi, and is on the place of Pon ial (above the path). A basalt column wall approximately 1.20. - 1.50 m, high, which is accessible on the west and measures 30 by 35 meters, forms a rectangle. In the interior, it contains, three platforms in which the small stone box graves, 1 to 1.30 meters in size, lay embedded; unfortunately, they are all destroyed. They were ortginally covered with basalt columns, which were rolled away by Christian, who rummaged these graves with little result"
Yap was the homeland of these dwarves
In his work Tracing Pacific Dwarf Myths throughout the Austronesian Expansion, Dean Karalekas, calls them "Sokele" and citing Peacock (1975) says "they came from Yap in olden times and no one saw them. But we heard that the dwarves settled down in the state of Kitti after coming from abroad..."
Are they Negritos?
So here are people with a different language, smaller, shorter, who used bow and arrows, dark-skinned, flat, broad faces, curly hair who reached Ponape from "a foreign land". Could these people be Negrito? The word negrito is Spanish, and means "small black people" They came across them in the Philippines.
These humans lived in the continental shelf, now submerged, known as Sundaland, between SE Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines around 40,000 years ago. They are found nowadays in the Andaman Islands, the Philippines and Malaysia. Their absence in Indonesia is probably due to their replacement and absorption by later larger, farming groups of people.
The ones living in the Philippines have the highest admixture of Denisovan DNA, even higher than the Papuans. (Source) It is likely that there was "an independent Denisovan introgression event in the Philippines among Negritos that is different from the Denisovan introgression event into the ancestors of Australopapuans" (Source). The similarity in the appearance of negritos and African pygmies is coincidence, and due to convergent evolutionary processes.
The possible presence of pygmies in Palau, an island 880 km (550 mi) east of the Philippines suggests they could have navigated across open ocean.
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