A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c8.23

c8.23

We turn now to a brief consideration of the racial composition of the population. We do not know to which stock the men of the Paleolithic Stage in South India belonged, as no human skeleton associated with this culture has yet been discovered in peninsular India, apart from a tibia at Attirampākkam (Chingleput). At Vadnagar in Baroda a fossil skeleton of a Pygmy man, thirty inches in height, was discovered in 1935; in this skeleton we probably have the earliest representative of the negrito in India. The negrito is a diminutive type of negro which, rising in Africa like the negro, passed through India eastward, and is found in the Andamans associated with a prelithic stage of culture. There is reason to hold that a large part of peninsular India was inhabited by this type for a considerable period of the old Stone Stage. The occurrence of dwarfish woolly-haired individuals with more or less round heads among the Kādars of Parambikkulam and the Pulaiyans of the adjoining Ānaimalai hills in the extreme south of the peninsula may be taken to attest the influence of this early negrito type. Designs on the bamboo combs of the Semangs, a negrito people of Malaya, seem to be identical with those on the combs used by Kādar women, a fact suggesting that originally the Kādars and the Semangs shared the same culture and possibly even belonged to the same ethnic group which underwent a change in India in consequence of the later advent of long-headed peoples.