Why are the Andamanese Negrito of more than local interest?
If an island of ice-age hunters was discovered in the Atlantic today, the press and scientists would trample each other to death in their eagerness get there. There would be scientific controversy and uproar all round. The Andamanese present just such a case – and until recently few people had even heard of them. The Andamanese are very ancient pygmy people living (until very recently and in some numbers still today) a palaeolithic hunting-gathering life, just as the ancestors of us all did until the end of the ice age, around 10,000 years ago. With new genetic discoveries (see Chapter 6), it has become increasingly likely that the Negrito and some rpopulations related to them (e.g. the Vedda, possibly the Dravidians, and others) do indeed represent the oldest anatomically modern Homo sapiens in Asia. They are also, possibly, among the ancestors of some Oceanic people and of the Australian aborigines. Yet until the recent upsurge in scientific interest and an Indian Supreme Court Rulin
