Human skeletal remains dating from around 6,000 years ago and resembling the negrito people have been unearthed in a mountainous cave in Taiwan’s eastern county of Taitung.
An ancient human skull and femur bone excavated from the Xiaoma Caves belonged to that of a female adult, according to a study by an international team of researchers led by Hung Hsiao-chun (洪曉純), a senior research fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Natural History at Australian National University.
The female shared cranial affinities and small stature characteristics in common with Indigenous Southeast Asians, particularly the short, dark-skinned negritos of northern Luzon in the Philippines, the paper said.
According to the researchers, the populace at one time likely inhabited Taiwan before the Formosan Austronesian-speaking population.
Many Indigenous tribes in Taiwan have tales about negritos inhabiting the island handed down from generation to generation, describing them as ‘non-Austronesian’ people and their physical traits as being small-bodied, dark skinned with frizzy hair and living in forested mountains or remote caves, they said.
The legends about the negritos also vary from tribe to tribe, with some viewing them as aliens and enemies of the Austronesian groups, while others saw them as their ancestors, the researchers said, indicating that one group also has a tale that describes how the last remaining negritos were killed.
Following DNA analysis, the cranial shape of the skull unearthed at Xiaoma closely resembled the negritos of the Philippines and Andaman Islands and San bushmen in South Africa, who all are well known for their short stature and small body size, the paper said.
Based on femur length, researchers said the Xiaoma female is estimated to have been 139 centimeters tall, but they could not confirm if the people were originally small in stature or developed in situ in Taiwan.
The study also pondered whether the Xiaoma negritos arrived as part of a second or later wave of hunter-gatherer migration to Taiwan around 6,000 years ago or earlier.
“The new findings bring attention to the period of co-existing overlap of the older hunter-gatherer communities with the new immigrant Austronesian-speaking farmers in Taiwan,” the paper said, noting that an answer may be possible in the near future to the related question as to the origin of the Xiaoma people, pending the discovery of any older Palaeolithic human remains in Taiwan.
The study titled “Negritos in Taiwan and the wider prehistory of Southeast Asia: new discovery from the Xiaoma Caves” was published by the peer-reviewed journal Taylor & Francis Online on Oct. 4.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel