When the microcontinents collided, the faunal and floral assemblages from two areas met. Living creatures are passive passengers on drifted microcontinents. Two "geologic worlds" of Sundaland (Asian) and Australian crustal masses/ microcontinents collided in Miocene to Pliocene making Sulawesi and adjacent islands. Two faunal worlds, meeting in Sulawesi was controlled by geologic processes. Two faunal assemblages from Asian and Australian worlds meet in Sulawesi side by side with the endemic faunas of Sulawesi. The revised Wallace Line (1910) lies more eastward than the original line to the east of Sulawesi. Original Wallace's Line ran between Bali and Lombok, extending between Borneo/ Kalimantan and Sulawesi, and between Philippines and Indonesia. The Wallace's Line separates the Oriental (Asian) and the Australian fauna and flora. Currently, it is known that the position of the line is geologically-dependent, a result of plate tectonic movements. This was all biologic line but since the beginning, Wallace thought that the line could have geologic background. "Wallace's Line", line of dividing faunal distribution in central Indonesia, came into being in 1863 and was named after Alfred Russel Wallace, the great English naturalist travelled Indonesian islands from 1854-1862. The question I would like to address here is, why did Wallace emphasize the virtuous qualities of the very races he had described as lowly in almost every respect? And why did he concentrate on the interracial harmony in the region rather than the deadly interracial struggle he expressed belief in only a few years before? For the humans of Wallace’s archipelago, life appears to be as Edenic as the natural environment they inhabit. Representative of prevailing scientific opinions at the time, these observations stand in sharp contrast to The Malay Archipelago’s observations of happy and harmonious interracial relations in the archipelago, not to mention its praise of the physical and moral attributes of the “savages” there. The 18 documents paint a sinister scenario indeed, casting interracial relations as an “unequal” and violent “struggle for existence” between the superior European races and the non-European races, whose mental, moral, and physical degradation doomed them to extinction. Just five years beforehand, in 1864, Wallace delivered a paper to the Anthropological Society of London, in which he declared that “the same great law of ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’” was resulting in “the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact”. In 1869, the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace-co-founder with Darwin of the evolutionary theory of natural selection-published an account of the eight years he had spent in the Malay Archipelago.
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