Nittaewo

The nittaewo (also nittevo) are a vanished race of small, hairy, long-clawed beings remembered in the traditions of Sri Lanka’s Veddah, the island’s indigenous hunter-gatherers. The accounts say they lived in the rugged south-east, in caves and tree platforms, in groups of ten or twenty, and that they were enemies of the Veddah. In the best-known story, the Veddah of the Mahaenama area trapped the last of them in a cave and smoked them out with a brushwood fire.

The tradition entered print in 1886, when the British civil servant Hugh Nevill published an account in his journal The Taprobanian. His informants included a district headman from Batticaloa and an old Veddah hunter’s recollections; they described creatures resembling orang-utans that walked upright, had reddish hair and powerful claws, and stole sun-dried meat. In 1914–15 Frederick Lewis collected further Veddah testimony, including an elderly man whose grandfather was said to have taken part in the cave killing, which writers date to roughly 1775–1800.

Later researchers tried to identify them. The British anatomist W. C. Osman Hill and the zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans suggested a relict primitive human, a dwarfed island Homo erectus, or a gibbon-like ape. The Sri Lankan naturalist R. L. Spittel argued in 1964 that the stories describe sun bears. A 1963 expedition led by Captain A. Rambukwella explored the Kudimbigala caves and found shells and bones that he linked to nittaewo feeding. In the mid-2000s the discovery of the small-bodied Homo floresiensis on Flores renewed discussion of whether tiny human relatives could survive on an island.

Whatever they were, the name survives in Sri Lankan place names and folklore. A cluster of 2019 village scares in Walasmulla and Anuradhapura described a black, gorilla-faced creature that bears little resemblance to Veddah accounts, and is generally regarded as a rumour or hoax.

Said to be three to four feet tall, upright and tailless, covered with reddish hair, with short strong arms ending in long claws; they spoke in a bird-like chatter.

Caves, rock shelters and tree platforms in the dry south-eastern forests around Mahaenama (now Yala East National Park), Kudimbigala and Thanthirimale.

The nittaewo appear in Sri Lankan newspapers and cryptozoological books; the name survives in towns such as Nittambuwa. The Veddah are a living community, and their oral history deserves to be treated as such rather than as a curiosity.