Cannibal dwarfs that hunted human flesh

Close to the land of Sulawesi lies the wild island of Flores where during 2005 anthropologists made the fantastic discovery of tiny skeletons–all that were left from a presumably dead race officially named as Homo Floresiensis, whimsically labeled as the “Hobbits.”

Yet not far away is another land…a land that is savage and brutal. A land of terror and legends. A land that now is a part of what today is called Sri Lanka.

It is the kingdom of the Nittevo.

Vicious, cannibalistic dwarfs

The Nittevo are described as vicious, cannibalistic dwarfs. For millennia they struck fear into the hearts of human inhabitants. The sub-human ape-men are claimed to exist even today and witnesses who have encountered them describe the Nittevo as having very dark complexions with broad heads; flattened noses; and thick, matted, wool-like hair. Nittevo men are just four to four and a half feet tall. The women are significantly shorter. Researcher Frederick Lewis wrote that the Nittevo were actually much shorter–none being over three feet tall and the women often under two feet.

Natives indigenous to the region say that the cruel dwarfs lived and hunted in the Mahalenama region now within the Yala East Intermediate Zone and the Tamankaduva area.

The Nittevo walked upright, wore no clothes and had not tails. They had claw-like fingernails and were extremely muscular. Most lived in trees sleeping at night within crudely fashioned huts wedged between branches.

Although their main diet consisted of berries, turtles, rabbits, crocodiles, monitor lizards and squirrels, it’s also said that they were known to invade human villages and carried off children and smaller women to indulge their taste for human flesh during wild cannibalistic festivals. Their religious festivals were often especially bloody and they sought out both humans and animals for sacrifices to the goddess.

A lost species of Java man?

William Charles Osman-Hill an anthropologist who wrote “Nittaewo–An unsolved problem of Ceylon” (Loris. 1945), proposed that the race of savage dwarves might have been isolated species of pithecanthropus or Java man.

That hypothesis was expanded upon by a Captain A. T. Rambukwella who had an article published in the 1963 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon. In the article, Rambukwella focused on the similarities of the Nittevo to the species Australopithecus, an ape-man found in South Africa and eastern Asia.    

Both speculations have been disproved.

Since the middle of the 18th Century, researchers have claimed that the last of the Nittevo were killed off by surrounding humans.

Killed off by the Indonesian Tsunami?

Yet despite the assumption that the Nittevo had gone extinct, reports of them continued on and off until that fateful Sunday, December 26, 2004, when the great Indonesian Tsunami wiped whatever trace of them remained from the face of the Earth.

In the years since the apocalyptic disaster, the surviving villagers of the region have come to accept the passing of the fearful Nittevo.

No longer do the natives there live in daily terror of the cannibalistic dwarfs…the ape-men out of time.

Original Helium article.

Follow me on Twitter…if you dare…

© Copyright AYM Communications. 2011