On the pages of many books about secrets and riddles, all kinds of little people are scattered as characters in many myths and legends - representatives of the so-called little "peoples": stories about them are spread almost in all corners of the earth.
They were called gnomes, dwarfs, and a dozen other names. However, they all have common features. These characters live in the neighborhood with people and enter into various contacts with them, the nature of which depends on the attitude of people towards them.
Dwarfs are a mythological "people" with their own household and family way of life, language, religion and habits. The life of dwarfs is presented as a reflection of human life, but often in a distorted form, indicating their belonging to the other world.
Where did different peoples, often thousands of kilometers apart, have such similar characters in legends? And why do they sometimes turn out to be real-life tribes?
The first little people whose existence was confirmed by modern scientists were pygmies. These Negroid tribes, whose height did not exceed 150 cm, were discovered in the 19th century. by the German scientist Schweinfurt and the Russian scientist Juncker in the rainforests of the Ituri and Uzle river basins.
However, pygmies have been proven to belong to our species of humans. Only unfavorable conditions and lack of food forced these tribes to grind. The issue of the so-called "Bushmen" - several surviving Khoisan tribes of East and South Africa, is being solved in a similar way.
Another thing is the Nitayevo people who disappeared without a trace. A Sinhalese hunter told the English traveler Hugo Neville about this tribe in 1887. The Nittayevo people lived in a remote mountainous region of the Leanama region of the island of Sri Lanka.
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They were short, upright creatures without tails, their height ranged from 90 to 120 cm. Their whole body was covered with thick hair. These creatures had powerful hands with short hands, the fingers of which ended in sharp long claws. Nittayevo's speech resembled a bird's tongue and consisted of whistling and chirping sounds.
These creatures lived in small groups in caves or on platforms - a kind of "nest" made of branches and covered with a canopy of leaves. They ate mainly meat. They caught squirrels, crocodiles, snakes, lizards, birds.
They immediately tore apart the victim's belly with sharp claws and feasted on its entrails. People from the Vedda tribe (the indigenous population of Sri Lanka, before the arrival of the Tamils and Sinhales) despised these creatures for their way of life. Since Nittayevo regularly stole meat from people that was hung out for drying, then soon peaceful coexistence came to an end.
Nittaevo had only sharp claws, and people had spears, bows and arrows. Dwarfs began to be exterminated in large numbers. Only due to their dexterity and cunning did they manage to survive for some time and even attacked sleeping people at night, ripping open their bellies with their long sharp claws.
However, this did not last long. At the end of the 18th century. The Vedda drove the last Nittaevo into the cave, covered the entrance with branches and set it on fire. They say none of the dwarfs survived.
Bernard Evelmans, a Franco-Belgian zoologist and writer, known as one of the founders of cryptozoology, collected most of the materials about Nittaevo. First of all, he became interested in the very name of this people. Hugo Neville draws it from the word "nishada", the name given by the Aryan invaders to nishadiva, or nigadiva, from which the Vedda was already made the word "nittaevo."
It follows that the Veddas themselves are not Nittai. But couldn’t the Nittai have been Negritos, the primitive Negroid population of Sri Lanka?
After all, the latter were 5 cm shorter than the Vedda, and many of them remained at a stage more backward than the Vedda, they did not even know fire. It was precisely the processing of this version that R. Spittel began in 1933. He found that tribes such as the Negritos still existed in South India. Among them are the frames of the Nilgiri Mountains.
A tribe from the Nilgiri mountains.
I also found out that pure Negritos live in the Andaman Islands. It could have happened, he believes, that India and Sri Lanka were conquered by the Negritos, among whom Nittayevo were the last.
To begin with, let us note that Spittel is apparently mistaken in attributing the kadars (most likely the kadirs) to the Negritos. They are undoubtedly a Veddoid race, but they also find traces of cross-breeding between the negritos and some tribes of the mountainous regions of India, and in Sri Lanka, with the Tammankaduwa Veddas.
Anthropologist Osman Hill opposes identifying Nittaevo with Negritos. Indeed, if we recall the constant atmosphere of enmity between them, it is difficult to imagine that they are relatives, although, of course, everything happens …
But if they are not primitive people, Euvelmans asks, then are they not apes, the most advanced of the primates? Recall when Jacob Bontius first described the orangutan from Borneo and Sumatra, he reported interesting folklore information about these creatures, overgrown with wool.
"The Javanese claim that they were born of Indian women who allegedly sleep with monkeys due to their hypersensitivity." But was the information on Nittaevo related to large monkeys?
According to Neville, much connects Nittaevo with the orangutan of the Malay Islands. But, as it is easy to see from the drawings, the orangutan is too large and heavy, he is an absolute vegetarian, leads an arboreal lifestyle and is a loner, so it does not fit the comparison with Nittaevo.
But gibbon from some positions is more suitable for such comparisons. He is smaller, and the tallest reach 90 cm standing, which corresponds to the growth of Nittaevo. He is constantly in a twisted position and moves on the ground on his hind legs - an amazing case among monkeys. In addition, this is a herd animal and is still an incomplete vegetarian: in addition to insects, it can eat bird eggs.
Of course, we are still far from the assertion that the Nitaevo were carnivorous and cruel, but if we attribute all this to the Vedda lies (you always want to present your enemy as bloodthirsty and terrible!), A giant gibbon could, as a last resort, according to Osman Hill, to turn out to be Nittaevo … But it must be a species that has not yet been described, because Siamangs are often always black, sometimes gray and brown, but not covered with thick hair like Nittaevo.
For the sake of fairness, we also note that this identification does not coincide well with what we know about the geographic distribution of gibbons.
They are found only east of the Ganges and south of the Brahmaputra in Thailand, Burma and the rest of Indochina, as well as on the islands of Sumatra, Java and Borneo. The presence of gibbons in Sri Lanka has not been proven, but this is not a conclusive argument.
In a word, the hypothesis according to which there were no anthropoids, but ordinary monkeys without a tail, does not stand up to criticism. And again, according to Hill, the most likely hypothesis about Nittayevo is the one that connects them with great apes.
The discovery of the remains of Pithecanthropus in Java and Sinanthropus, very similar to them, in China proves, according to Hill, that these people-apes once inhabited most of Asia and were hunted in Malaysia by stronger invaders. They could reach Sri Lanka when the island still had a land bridge to the continent, and could exist there until relatively recently.
Obviously, the real "people-monkeys", which, according to some scientists, were just gigantic gibbons leading an arboreal lifestyle, in fact turned out to be the very Nittaevo that the Vedda tells us about.
“And yet I do not understand very well why Dr. Hill thinks that insufficient growth is a trait that brings Nittaevo closer to Pithecanthropus,” B. Eyvelmans admits. “These last ones were of a height similar to ours. This is proved by the size of the skull and the length of the femur. But it is also possible that Pithecanthropus lived in isolation in Ceylon for a long time and formed a dwarf race there, as is often the case in island isolates.
Alas, today we are no longer in a position to test Hill's hypothesis; only systematic excavations in the Leanam area can help. But if in Sri Lanka they talk about Nittaevo as a disappeared people, then in other parts of the Indo-Malay region there are still rumors that hairy dwarfs are still hiding in hard-to-reach places.
Unfortunately, Dr. Evelmans did not know anything about the research on the island of Flores, where a dwarf race of ancient people was found - the so-called. hobbits. If these findings are accepted by academic scientists (which is problematic), a lot will fall into place.