Nittaewo

Accounts recorded in 19th- and early 20th-century collections present the Nittaewo as a discrete non-human tribe remembered in Veddah oral tradition. Multiple informants reported that Veddah hunters rounded up the last Nittaewo into a cave and suffocated them by blocking the entrance with brushwood and setting it alight; commentators date this extermination to the late 18th century in the oral chronology. These details derive from recorded Veddah testimony as collected and published by Hugh Nevill and later investigators and summarized in modern reference sources (see citations). The narrative is transmitted as communal memory rather than as independently verified archaeological or biological fact.

Veddah accounts describe the Nittaewo as small (about 3–4 ft / 0.9–1.2 m), habitually bipedal, covered in hair often said to be reddish, with very short but powerful arms and hands bearing long or hooked claws/nails. Females were reported as smaller. They slept in caves or in leaf-nests among branches. Later alleged modern sightings (reported in 1984 and in a 2019 wave of local reports) give different descriptions—including claims of a black, gorilla-faced creature with long claws—which diverge from the classical Veddah testimony and are noted in sources as inconsistent with the original accounts.

In the oral accounts the Nittaewo were opportunistic carnivores: said to feed on small game such as squirrels, small deer, tortoises, lizards and shellfish, and to eat raw entrails after disemboweling prey with their claws. They reportedly did not use tools, lived in small parties, and vocalized in a 'sort of burbling, or birds' twittering' which some Veddahs claimed to understand. The tradition claims they attacked sleeping humans on occasion; at the same time Veddah storytellers said the Nittaewo had no effective defense against human bows and arrows. These are reported behaviors in folklore and are not corroborated by archaeological evidence in the cited sources.