Sri Lanka’s Vedda people, long believed to be the island’s earliest human inhabitants, share close genetic bonds with five Indian tribal populations, a new study has found, bolstering evidence for their roots in the Indian subcontinent’s earliest modern human populations.

A team of Indian and Sri Lankan scientists has found that the Vedda share a strong genetic similarity with the Austroasiatic Munda-speaking Santhal and Juang tribes in Odisha and the Dravidian-speaking Irula, Paniya, and Pallar found in Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.

Their study, published this week in the scientific journal Mitochondrion, has revealed that the Vedda have a greater genetic similarity with these five tribes than with either Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese or Tamil populations with whom they have shared the island for centuries.

“This was a surprise – it shows Sri Lanka as an amazing place where three populations living side by side interacted very differently with one another,” Gyaneshwer Chaubey, a population geneticist at the Banaras Hindu University who supervised the study, said.

“The Sinhala and Tamil are massively mixed – you could call them genetically nearly indistinguishable, but the Vedda have remained largely isolated; they’ve maintained their identity by very low mixing,” Chaubey told The Telegraph.

Archaeological excavations show that modern humans have been occupying Sri Lanka for the past 30,000 years, perhaps longer. The Vedda, originally hunter-gatherers, are the island’s only indigenous population and are believed to be the direct descendants of the island’s earliest inhabitants. 

(The Telegraph)