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.
