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 14^th  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 ?