PREHISTORIC MAN IN CEYLON JOHN STILL Kandy, Ceylon

WITH INTRODUCTORY REMARKS BY A. HRDLIEKA

During my visit to Ceylon in May of this year, I made whatever inquiries and observations were possible on the subject of prehistoric man in that island. Anthropologically, as well as otherwise, this large island is in a strategic position. It could hardly have escaped any spread of man from southern India. If southern India had an early man (which, however, is still uncertain), then Ceylon should have received him also. And if early man reached Ceylon he must have left material remains, cultural as well as skeletal, of his occupation.

Of such remains, however, nothing is as yet known. No skeletal re- mains of geologically ancient man have ever been found. But the island with its numerous caves and ancient water-holes has never yet been properly explored.

What is well known is that various sites in the hills yield stone chips, with here and there an implement. These sites, though, are generally superficial, on the tops of ridges and elevations. The stones consist mostly of fresh-looking chips of quartz. The rare implements are chipped, never polished, and approach more or less the later palzolithic forms. They have not been found thus far in any geologically old strata, nor with the remains of extinct animals. Their nature, work- manship and relative freshness suggest no very ancient origin. There are two exhibition cases full of such tools (with rejects and chips) at the Colombo Museum. They are described as well as pictured in the “Spolea” of the Museum. So far they offer no satisfactory evidence of early man.

In visiting Kandy it was my good fortune to be taken by Dr. Pieris, the respected Judge of Kandy, and Dr. Nell, a well known local oculist and student of the natives, to Mr. John Still, one of the oldest whites in Ceylon, for many years in Government employ which took him to all parts of the island, and a keen, educated observer. With Mr. Still we spent a most interesting evening, full of information especially about the remnants of the Veddas and about the occurrence of stone implements. This first-hand knowledge was such that I asked Mr. Still to prepare me a brief written account of whatever in the island may point to man’s prehistory; and the following well-written notes are the result. They

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settle nothing. They show no ancient man. But they tell, perhaps more clearly and authoritatively than has been done before, of the actual conditions as well as opportunities for exploration.

A. H.

Dr. HrdliEka of the Smithsonian Institution has asked me to put down on paper the substance of a conversation we had concerning the evidences of prehistoric man in Ceylon.

I will attempt to do so, but must preface that my observations have not been professional or systematic, but have been among: the recrea- tions of a man interested in all that stimulates wholesome mentality.

The observations have been made in a random fashion, and will be recorded in like manner. The inferences drawn from the things seen have grown very slowly, and are not dogmatically held. The result will be a paper intended to be, and it is hoped fit to be, a part of the stock of knowledge that some more serious inquirer may be aided with a t the outset of some future inquiry into the whole question of primitive man in Ceylon.

The shape and situation of Ceylon have to be taken into consider- ation first, for it is probable that these have altered but little in the last hundred thousand years, despite a Sinhalese legend to the contrary. Ceylon is so shaped that its climate is, broadly speaking, divided into a region which receives the rains of the south-west monsoon and a region which does not. The civilization developed under Dutch and British rule during the last three centuries lies in the former, the sou’west monsoon region; and the civilization that gave birth to the old Bud- dhist cities known to archaeology lay in the latter, the dry zone. The probable reason of this is to be written in one word, MALARIA; for the map compiled by the government pathologist showing in different shaded areas the prevalence of malarial infection among school children might almost equally well be used as an illustration to show those areas where ancient Buddhist remains are most prevalent. A secondary reason is to be found in the crops raised. In the old days Ceylon grew its food supply under irrigation, water being carried down from the wet hills to great storage tanks in the dry plains and there distributed through an infinity of channels and lesser tanks to the fields. &4t pres- ent Ceylon buys its food, to a very large degree, by its exports of tea, coconuts, and rubber (formerly coffee and cinnamon), all of which are grown in the wet zone on natural and unstored rainfall.

Primitive man lived in both of these zones, and probably in the whole of each, for his remains are veq7 widely spread if not universal. This is

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provocative of wonder whether malaria is comparatively a late comer to Ceylon. The present day Sinhalese certainly have not the grit to re- conquer the malarious forests on the east and north; and it seems very doubtful if they were ever much more vigorous than they are a t the present time. Despite all that has been said about them, their ancient buildings are not really in any way very remarkable. But whether earlier man had to contend with malaria or not, he wandered all over the island; and wherever he went he left chert and crystal chips to blaze his trail like boys on a paper-chase. These chips are to be found in almost any quantity desired, but very few indeed are actual instru- ments. They litter the hill tops, but only one in hundreds convinces one that it was definitely shaped for a definite purpose; though all have most obviously been brought up from the valleys as whole stones and knocked into slivers on the tops of the hills. Occasionally a core is found, but for the most part the discoveries are limited to waste chips, thrown away unwanted.

Crystal chips are vastly more common than chert chips in any area I have observed: perhaps one thousand times as common.

When the country as a whole definitely left the stone age behind i t I am unable to say; but among the ruins of Sigiriya, a rock fortress of about the sixth century A.C., not only are quantities of iron tools, nails, and other articles found, but also steel.

Early records give accounts of two races in Ceylon before the coming of Vijaya, the first Sinhalese, in the fifth century B.C. These records are the Sinhalese historical books, the earliest of which dates from the fifth or sixth century A.C., but was founded on earlier works now per- ished : the legends current in their day and noted by the Chinese book collectors of the same period approximately : and the Ramayana, which is a good many centuries earlier, and perhaps was in existence before Vijaya. In all these mention is made of Yakkhas or Rakshasas, and of Nagas. And from the place names, from local legends still current, and from one other set of evidences, it appears that the Yakkhas occu- pied roughly the territory now occupied by the so-called Kandyans, and the Nagas the part of the island occupied by the low-country Sinhalese, and perhaps a part of the Easter Province. Ptolemy’s map appears to bear this out too.

The other set of evidences referred to is the constant division of the Sinhalese nation into two races or sub-kingdoms from the earliest his- torical times up to the present day, when political rivalry keeps them widely apart. There are slight differences in the tongue; there are differences in the dress of both men and women: there are differences in

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the relative distribution of the castes; and there are differences in the religion which everywhere lies thinly buried beneath Buddhism. In fact the two divisions have all the appearance of being two allied but separate ancient races. Again to refer to their distribution, it suggests that the Nagas were the first comers, and that the Yakkhas were driven into them as a wedge, the Nagas being forced to retreat East and South of the central hills. Going further, and trying to connect with the earlier historical traditions of the Sinhalese, it seems worth hazarding a guess that the Kandyans are a Sinhala-Yakkha-Tamil compound, and the Low-country Sinhalese an East coast of India-Naga-Tamil compound, with as much or more Tamil than the others, but of later intermixture.

The implements should be examined by an expert to decide if they bear out this general division and if they carry it back into remoter ages than legend and history can probe.

The Ramayana gives a clew that may lead to the discovery of yet another pre-Sinhalese tribe; for it refers many times to the enemies of the on-coming Aryans as the “disturbers of sacrifices,” obviously people who were antagonistic to the Arya religion; and among those thus rep- robated are the Kinnaras, a semi-human folk, half beast. A very low and very distinctive caste of Sinhalese, the only caste whose men wear short hair, is known as Kinnarayo, the plural form of Kinnara. This name, taken in conjunction with the Ramayaya is suggestive, but it may by a coincidence. The Veddhas, often identified as the Yakkhas, seem to me to be indistinguishable from the more “jungly” Sinhalese, and I believe the Sinhalese are full of Veddha blood. In a country where sexual intercourse has for centuries been largely pro- miscuous racial distinctions tend to disappear rapidly unless fortified by topographical separation, as has been to some degree the case with the Kandyans and Low-country Sinhalese until recent years. Roads and motor bus traffic will soon wipe out any remaining physical differ- ences.

The remains themselves have to be considered, and I am incompetent to do this, but I can describe where they have been found, and what is more, where they may be found.

All over the hills, in the Sou’west zone and out of it as well, crystal chips are very common. It is no use looking in the valleys or on the hill slopes; at least I have not seen any there; but wherever a little round hill overhangs a valley with a trickle of a stream in it chips will be found. Just on the cap of the hill, and if that rises again to a second summit, then on the cap of that again. In the jungle it is very difficult to find a stone at all, because of the leaf mould, but the tea estates,

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which were once coffee estates, offer a happy hunting growd; for their soil is kept weeded, and as tea is planted about four feet apart in holes dug eighteen inches deep the soil has been thoroughly turned up and the hidden crystals revealed. Where one finds cores they are always waterrolled pebbles, quite unlike the veins of crystal which occasionally outcrop on the hills. They are valley stones, but found when chipped on the tops of hills. They are common around Kandy between one and two thousand feet above sea level, and they are common on the hills in the Maskeliya district at five thousand feet and over. Those regions both get the sou’west monsoon, and Maskeliga a t any rate appeared to be virgin forest; but the stones are equally common on every hilltop in the vicinity of Bandarawela hotel situated at about four thousand five hundred feet elevation in the zone which gets no sou’west. An enormous number of these Bandarawela chips have been described as pigmies, but possibly the whole subject should be reviewed by more expert if not more ardent collectors. Anyhow, the stones were brought to the hill tops and there chipped; when and why we do not yet know.

Another place where I should be inclined to look for prehistoric man in the hills is in the caves where the esculent swift’s nests are to be found. There are plenty of such caves, and I do not think they have been explored.

But to return to the Bandarawela chips. The hills round Bandara- wela are what is called patna, grass land. There are a number of such lands in the hills; e.g., the Horton Plains, which are not plains a t all but a series of steep little valleys covered with short grass dotted with rhododendron trees and rising to over 7000 feet elevation: the Elk Plains, similar but not so high up : the Bo-pats, again the same, a t about 5000 feet, and many more such “patna” lands. I do not know if many of these have been searched for chips, but I fancy not by anyone qualified to pronounce on them. My own impression, for what it is worth, is that these grass lands are the clearings of prehistoric man made after the discovery of fire. The Sinhalese burn such lands annual- ly, in February generally when the grass is ripe, so that they will spring up fresh and green and provide feed for their cattle. They also burn them in the low country for another reason, in order that they may look for shed antlers more easily and with the danger of snakes mini- mised, so they have told me when I asked why they had done this ap- parently wanton thing, destroying hundreds of birds. For many years “patna” land was despised and avoided by planters. It had no forest, while the neighbouring lands had, and the inference was that forest would not grow there. But tea has now been grown successfully on

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many a “patna” land, and moreover it had been proved by the forest department that forest can be grown there too if it is protected from fires. In Ceylon, even in the dry zone in the driest weather, even when the grass is ripe and dried to a yellow hay, fire will not spread into the jungle. The trees do not catch fire. But, oil the other hand young seedlings cannot resist fire; it is only when they grow big enough to shade the grass sufficiently to prevent it drying completely right up to their stems that they are safe. There remain the rhododendrons, and lower down the kahata trees; both of these kinds are found in “patnas,” and their fire resisting capacity must be very great. But on the whole I do not think an area once deforested will reforest itself if men burn off the grass. The old abandoned coffee estates have shown no sign of so doing in fifty years. And it seems reasonable to say that the ques- tion of the “patnas” being prehistoric man’s clearings is worthy of scientific investigation.

Another matter which is allied with the hill-top chips is the elephant roads. Up to seventy or eighty years ago elephants were common all over the region now occupied by the tea estates, and their roads are even now remembered in some parts. In the great forests of the highest hills and all over the forests of the plains wild elephants are quite com- mon, and I have often travelled by their roads; for the elephant is an excellent road maker, and the forests of part of the Adams Peak range are so densely matted with the creeping bamboo that it is next to im- possible to make a bee line through them; so one follows the elephant roads. Now these roads differ from human roads in one important particular, for they follow along the ridges whereas our own roads follow valleys. A human road or railway penetrating a hilly country from the low lands chooses a valley and follows it up through the hills, changing by a bridge from side t o side wherever necessary; but an elephant would go differently; in all probability he would choose a spur, climb to its ridge, and find his way into the upper hills by pursuing each ridge until it connected with a range, and then continuing along the backbone of the range. It is not difficult to conceive his reasons for doing this, for valleys are liable to be boggy and an elephant fears marsh or swamp on account of his enormous weight. But the elephant’sreasons are less my point than the man’s. Man drains swampy valleys for the sake of the good soil to be found in them, and he makes his dwellings in the neighbourhood of his gardens or fields, and near water: so it comes to pass that his roads which follow thousands of years later follow the valleys too. But before man made fields or had permanent dwellings there was not this particular reason to stay in valleys; they were fuller

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of mosquitos, and being swampy were full of frogs, a very dangerous thing for the children, for where there are frogs there will be snakes. So, until he drained and occupied the valleys man probably avoided them like the elephant, but for different reasons. He therefore used the elephant'sroads for the very same reasons that I did myself when ex- ploring the Adams Peak ranges more than twenty years ago: it was easier and saved me from cutting paths; and man in the stone age did not want to waste his frail and valuable crystal tool on cutting paths when the elephants were able to save him the whole of the trouble. I mention this because I think I have observed an association of chip covered hill tops with elephant roads. Again, it is worth while investi- gating further, further than I have the leisure or training to go.

Now from the hill top chips it is necessary to pass to the chips of the plains; and a description of the country must be made first. From the foothills to the north and to the east plains stretch to the sea. They undulate slightly, and are really a series of shallow almost imperceptible valleys which were used in the first millennium A. D. for constructing reservoirs for irrigation. To the present day the only water on which human communities are based in by far the greater part of this region are so called tanks, reservoirs of stored water. There are a few places where the people rely on wells, but they are not in my story. The old buddhist civilization has perished, and this wide region has the appear- ance when viewed from the top of a hill of being an unbroken forest stretching for hundreds of square miles. It is pierced by a few roads and a few channels, and a few of the great storage tanks have been re- paired; but for the most part the country is empty of human beings and has gone back to the condition it was in before the irrigation began t o enable man to conquer the wilderness. For ages there was forest in- habited by bears, leopards, deer, pigs, elephants, and a host of lesser beasts: then for about fifteen centuries, more or less, irrigation tamed it and fields, villages, and cities sprang into being: then, in the thirteenth century A. D. it began to go back to the forest, and now it is much so as it was a thousand centuries ago. And it is the paradise of the hunter of big game; I have hunted there myself many and many a time. I have watched the herds of wild elephants in the glades, and heard their trumpeting while they quenched their huge thirst in one or other of the rare streams that do not dry up. I have sat in a tree and seen the deer drink a t the narrow water-holes among the rocks; and where no suitable tree grew close enough to the hole I have sat on the rock itself behind a few boulders disposed as a rampart and seen bear after bear comedown to the water's edge to &ink, and in the difficult light of the

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moon I have seen the leopard steal silently from the shadows and sit by the waters side listening to the belling of the deer. And the deer in their herds have come with timorous step and stood in terror, afraid even to drink, while the wind bore to them tidings of their enemies in the woods around. I have done this, and so did primitive man.

It occurred to me very many years ago to look by the waterholes for chips, and in a number of instances I found them. For prehistoric man sat by the same holes for the same reason that I did.

These waterholes are usually clefts in an outcrop of gneiss, narrow and deep, able to hold water right through the drought for their catch- ment area of rock surface may be very large in proportion to their surface area; and a slight shower, too slight to let the floor of the jungle become really wet, may put a foot or more of water into them. They, and the very rare perennial streams, are the only source of water supply apart from the works of man. Englishmen hunt there for leopards and bears, and natives shoot deer at the waters edge although it is illegal. Prehistoric man unquestionably must have done the same.

Waterholes are often traps, for their edges become polished like glass by the feet of the animals; then they evaporate, or are sucked up by herds of elephants, and the water sinks until the animals have to stoop and stretch to get down to the precious liquid, and sometimes they fall in. I have seen a live wild elephant in a waterhold, a prisoner unable to escape. I have seen a smallish crocodile in a waterhole lying belly upwards and slashed by a leopard's claws so as to be practically disem- bowelled. I have seen a bear dead and drowned in a waterhole; and in the mud a t the bottom of one that had dried up I have seen the antlers of two sorts of deer and the bones of wild boars. For there is always mud a t the bottom of these holes, sometimes a great depth I think.

It is easy to imagine what a field of discovery awaits any one who makes a thorough study of prehistoric man's relics in waterholes; and properly dated too by the gradual accumulation of the mud. How often he must have lost his arrow, his knife, his spear head, his orna- ments, his pottery, and perhaps even his children in waterholes. I do not think any search whatsoever has been made except my own slight observations mentioned here. Sometimes by waterholes there are rude shelters of unshaped stones to be found: I have used old ones, and made new ones myself: and so did the earliest men, for the same reason, to hide their presence from the animals coming to drink.