The folklore
of many countries contain legends concerning pygmies ,and Sri lanka is no exception. From the island
dimly illuminated past come jungle tales of the Nittaewo , supposedly a
subhuman or beastlike race , characterized
by hairy bodies and long nails . In the
absence of skeletal remains , however ,no precise identification can be made.
And so the Nittaewo remain one of the greatest enigma associated with Sri
lanka.
Remarkably , the existence of Pygmies was not accepted
by science until 1887,when the work of the French anthropologist ,
Quatrefages De Breau , became recognized
. Yet it was in the fourth century BC
that Ctesias , a Greek physician at the Persian court, first wrote in detail of
“ little men ” who inhabited the island then known as Taprobane .
At the beginning of the Christian era ,
Pliny the Elder continued in such a vein when he mentioned the occurrence of
“beast - men” in the region . The mystery
surrounding their identity appeared to be solved in the year 400 , when
Bishop Palladius described the race of primitive people to be found on the
island . Palladius was referring to the Veddahs , an original
tribe racially mixed remnants of which
exist to this day , who are Sri lankan’s last link with her prehistory .
Belief in the existence off “beast –
men ” was revived in the 14th as a result of a visit to the island by
the Moroccan travellers , Ibn Batuta . “these animals are very numerous in the
mountains ”, he wrote of the monkeys ,
probably referring to the purple-faced leaf monkey (Tachythecus vetulus
) . They are of black colour , and have long
tails .Those of the male sex have beard
like men . The monkeys have the chief
whom they obey like a sovereign . He binds round his head a wreath made of
leaves of trees , and support himself with a staff.
Over five centuries later new clue emerged
that lent weight to the ancient reports
, gave reasons to believe that the Veddahs
were unlikely to be Pliny’s “beast-men ” after all. In 1886 Hugh Nevill
reported in his journal The Taprobain that he had gathered
fragments of information concerning a strange race called Nittaewo .
Nevill’s first informant claimed
that he had heard many accounts of the Nittaewo . They were a race of pygmies
that inhabited the almost inaccessible mountains of Leanama region in southeast
corner of the island. Similar creatures weresaid to be found at Thamankaduwa
near Polonnaruwa as well as in the forest around Pomparippu and Thanthirimalai
on the northwest coast.
The nittaewo were reported to resemble orangutans or
gorillas,and were expert at climbing trees . They had some human trails , such
as the ability to walk upright .They were conspicuous by their covering of
reddish hair,and their claws were of great length.
Nevill investigated the
story for himself by visiting the Leanama country. There he learnt from other
informants that the Nittaewo descended from the rocks in gangs to steal meat that had been spread out
in the sun to dry by Vedahs hunters. During such raids the Veddahs hid in fear of attack fron the Nittaewo’s
fearsome claws.
Eventually Nevill met a hunter who had known
an old Veddah called Koraliya. This Veddah had said that the Nittaewo lived in
small groups , sleeping in caves or on platforms of branches in trees. It was
inevitable thet these two competing races became constant enemies. As legend
has it , the Nittaewo were rounded up by the Veddahs and driven into a cave.
The veddahs then heaped wood in front of
the entrance set fire to it. The ensuring bonfire burned for three days and the
trapped Nittaewo were all suffocated. Ironically the Veddahs of Leanama them
selves died out a few generations later – and with them was lost the location
of the cave .
Although much of Nevil’s reports was based on third hand information , it was
corroborated by Frederick Lewi’s , in 1914. During an exploration of the area,
lewis learnt from a family of Veddahs extraction that the Nittaewo had
been exterminated not more four generations earlier – around 1775 – and that arelative of this family had
taken an active part in burning their last encampments.
The
information on Nittaewo gleaned by lewis tailed very close with Nevill’s and
fortunately supplemented it. According to Lewis, the Nittaewo were about a meter in height and hairy legs.
But the super body was more human-like , and they walked erect. Their arms were short and
powerful,with large hands and long ,hooked nails similar to talons of the
eagles. These claws they used to tear to pieces the animals they caught , such
as mouse deer ,hares ,squirrels , monitor lizards , tortoises , and even
crocodiles. They could not capture large animals except by surrounding them, and for this reason they
lived in small troops .
The Nittaewo never ventured near
the sea ;instead they restricted themselves to the forest –lad ,cave-ridden
slopes of the mountains. Their vocal powers comprised a sound like twittering
go birds , a means of communication that was only understood by the Veddahs.
The only creatures they were afraid of
were the ill-natured buffalo , and dogs – the later because the Veddahs
used them in packs.
Lewis took particular care to
make inquiries at a distant village on the opposite side of the creatures
supposed range. To his surprise ,the elder inhabitant there was able to
duplicate the information in every detail. ”It is difficult ,” commented Lewis ,
“to reject as false a story told devoid of the usual embellishment that
characterize the history of mythical creatures, when it is completely confirmed
by parties ignorant of what the others
have said.”
The strand of information collected by
Nevill and Lewis , together with the body of the ancient writings were not
subjected to any serious scientific analysis
until a visit to the island in 1945 by professor W.C. Osman Hill of
Edinburgh University. Although he could not obtain any tangible data from his
visit to Leanama region , as an expert on the primates he was able to write an
examination of the somewhat flimsy evidence.
It was Hill admitted , one of
the most difficult task he had tackled , but in Nittaewo: An Unsolved
Problem of Ceylon, he bought to the subject the perspective of the
comparative zoologist. He came to the conclusion that Pithecanthropus of
Java ,a speechless hominid intermediate modern man and the anthropoid apes ,
accord best with the tradition of the Nittaewo. Furthermore , Hill speculated
that Pithecanthropus might
also be responsible for the stories of the Orang-Pendek the Nittaewo’s – sounding counterpart from
Sumathra. To support this hypothesis , he traced in detail the nature
affinities that link Sumathra with Sri lanka.
The unsolved identity of Nittaewo was
once again raised in 1958 in Bernard
Heuvelman’s book on such mysteries worldwide , On The Track Of
Wild Animals . In the chapter called Nittawo the Lost People of Ceylon,
the author review of the available literature on the subject with of the
intriguing statement,”Asia may still hide unknown apes whose mental development
ishigher than that of the anthropoid apes. Or it may be inhabited by men more
primitive than the Australian Aborigines , The Veddahs or the African Bushmen,
and still at the Neanderthal stage .”
In October 2004 , on the Idonesian island
of Flores, there was discovered the skeleton of an entirely new and small species
of human, Homo floreseinsis, which quickly acquired the
nickname The Hobbit . could the
existence of Homo floreseinsis rehabilitate
persistence rumours of undiscovered
human like species in the region , notably the
orang –pendek. and the Nittaewo ?