Lots of questions and few answers
Every archaeologist working on prehistorical sites knows: the more you dig the more you find (if you are lucky) and the less you know. Prehistoric finds by themselves usually mean little, an outline of sense only begins to appear when large numbers of finds are available that can be compared, analysed and correlated. There are no large numbers of finds and there is hardly any archaeological activity in the Andamans now. Nor are there vast numbers of researchers actively excavating sites and in Southeast Asia as a whole. Despite the frustratingly frequent use of "could", "is likely" and "perhaps", the picture we paint below is based on some facts and it does make overall sense. This may not be very satisfactory - but it is all that can be offered at the present state of knowledge.
Looking through the technical literature, we have noticed that professional archaeologists reporting on their sites and finds draw comparisons between their finds and those of other sites. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with this, it is part of their work. What strikes us as odd is that even if the evidence discussed has been found in the wider neighbourhood of the the Andaman islands, the Andamanese Negritos are hardly ever mentioned. They seem to be a sort of blind spot among professional prehistorians.
In such a situation, maps laying out what limited evidence there is are surely the best available medication to wilful blindness, overheated speculation, wishful thinking and all the other psychological malfunctions that we are suffer from at time or another. Hence the preponderance of maps in this chapter.
Connecting a specific population (whether extinct or still living) to a specific prehistoric tool technology is something that archaeologists very seldom do, or can do. Indeed, A prehistoric tool industry could have been invented by one people, only to be used by several different peoples later. Professional archaeologists normally talk of "tool industries" without identifying the people who made the tools; in Europe, for example, it took decades of work on countless finds by large numbers of archaeologists before the association of the Mousterian stone tool industry with Neanderthal man was widely accepted.
In the Andamans, the situation is by archaeological standards highly unusual. Only in Tasmania is there something similar. No other prehistoric peoples are known to have inhabited islands in such isolation for so long - and until as recently as the 19th century. In those two cases it is, for once, reasonable to assume that all archaeological finds that have not obviously come from the outside world and predate the 19th century have been made by the Andamanese Negrito (or the Tasmanians in their case). The stone tools found in Andamanese kitchen midden and described in the previous chapter are closely related to a specific stone tool industry, the Toalean (see below). This industry has been found all over the Indonesian archipelago and beyond. However, the conclusion that if the Andamanese tools are Toalean, all Toalean tools must have been made by Negrito is not possible. Other people can have made those tools, copied from Negrito or the Negrito copied from them. The fact that the Andamanese used a Toalian stone technology does indicate that the Negrito ancestors were much more widespread in the past and not nearly as isolated then as they were during the last 2,000 years.
Australia seems to have received its first human immigrants around 50,000 years ago. On their way to Australia, the migrants must have passed through the Indonesian archipelago. Indeed, Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua-New Guinea today number among their citizens genuine Negritos as well as many small groups possibly related to the Negrito(see map below). Most of the suspected relatives are small and secretive groups, barely known and researched. Many are also on the verge of extinction. Do they mark the trail of peoples that moved (quite likely in several waves) through the archipelago and into Australia, there to become the Tasmanian and Australian aborigines? Quite likely, but we don't know for sure yet.
The Andamanese Negrito are a population that has undoubtedly been isolated from the outside world for a long time. The genetic evidence does not allow doubts here. The most immediately convincing reason for such isolation is a long period of residence in the Andaman islands. The handful of Indian archaeological excavations in the islands have so far found an oldest archaeological date for an Andamanese presence of only 2,280 years from the present (with an uncertainty +/-90 years). In prehistory, this is almost yesterday and not old at all. Where were the Andamanese before? Are they recent arrivals in the previously uninhabited islands? Or have the few archaeological trenches been dug in the wrong places? Have the older sites on the ancient coastline been drowned by the rising sea and the higher ones been hidden by the jungle? We can only guess.
In the present patchy state of our knowledge, we are dealing in probabilities. Most probably, the Andamanese formed part of a large Southeast Asian area inhabited at one time by Negritos of which the Aeta (in the Philippines) and the Mani (in Thailand), the Semang (in Malaysia) and the Aeta (in the Philippines) are also surviving remnants. But were the Andamanese already living on the islands when most of Southeast Asia was Negrito territory or did they only move into the Andaman refuge later? Your guess is as good as ours. Was that more or less unified Negrito population broken up and largely destroyed by the Great Migrations of modern groups speaking languages of the Austronesian (Malayan etc), Austroasiatic (Khmer, Nicobari, etc) and Sino-Tibetan (Thai, Burmese, etc) families from the north between 8,000 and 5,000 years ago? Probably it was.
An enigma within a riddle (if I may be allowed to to mangle Sir Winston Churchill out of context just this once) is the possible relationship between Negritos and Veddoids. The Vedda are the aboriginal people of Sri Lanka and there are many Vedda-like (Veddoid) people in India as well as probably in Southeast Asia. Just how or whether the Negrito groups are related to the Veddoid groups and whether the Vedddoid really are related with each other is - you may have guessed as much by now - quite unknown.
Investigating DNA among these many groups will not only answer a lot of these questions (and no doubt throw up new questions), it will also put dates to the various forking points. Getting answers here is not just of interest to the unworldly few who are interested in the Negrito and Veddoid groups for their own sake, but answers would also throw light on a murky era when Homo sapiens became HUMAN. And those are definitively not questions that interest only specialists.
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