35. The Negrito of Malaysia

 

The Semang

by George Weber

 

 

The geographical position of the Malay Peninsula has been the passage of choice for people moving south from very ancient times. It is likely that the Negrito (or rather their ancestors) were among the first modern humans to use and settle along that route, followed possibly a bit later by the ancestors of the Veddoids. Most data available on the Semang at present is unfortunately still of the type acquired by "looking" and "measuring". Some DNA tests have been reported from a number of SE Asian remnant Veddoid and proto-Malay remnant populations but the results show such an enormously complicated picture that it is still very far from being sorted out. This is hardly surprising in the "migratory highway" that is SEAsia and the Malay peninsula.

Malaysia is split geographically into a continental peninsular and an insular part occupying the eastern coast of Borneo with the states Sarawak and Sabah. Both parts of the country have a remarkably deep prehistory of modern humans but there are no living Negritoid or Veddoid tribes living in Borneo. The famous Niah cave in Sarawak have been visited and inhabited by many prehistoric humans back to 30,000 years or more but no provable connection to Negrito-like people has been found.

Peninsular Malaysia has the Negrito Semang and some Veddoid groups with Negritoid admixtures as well as remnant proto-Malay tribes. It also has some very ancient archaeological sites. At least one site at Bukit Jawa in Kelantan State goes back more than 50,000 years. At that time, sea levels were much lower and much of what is now sea between the Sunda islands was dry land. Beach and other prehistoric sites, therefore are now deep under water and next to impossible to find and excavate. The stone tool technology called Hoabinhian (so known from its north Vietnamese site) is known from all over mainland Southeast Asia. It has tentatively been linked to Negritos but this has not been definitively confirmed and remains an open question.

The reason why it is so difficult to link palaeolithic tools in SE Asia to any living group of people is that while stone tools survive practically forever but human bones do not, especially not in a hot and humid climate. For human bones in a SE Asian climate to survive even 10,000 years - let alone 30 or 50,000 - takes very rare and exceptional circumstances.

 

The Semang tribes live (or used to live) in the mountainous interior of peninsular Malaysia where they have lived in close association with a variety of Veddoid and tribal Malay groups. They are, however, physically and culturally much more closely related to the Andamanese Negrito than to their long-term Veddoid neighbours. Although they do not seem to have mixed much, their contact was still close enough for them to acquire cultural traits that differentiate them somewhat from the Andamanese. In view of the long separation from each other, it is remarkable how well they have kept their common "Negrito heritage". Among Negrito, the Andamanese remain unique for having preserved their original languages. The Semang have adopted the language of the Mon-Khmer wave of migrants surrounding them perhaps since before 7,000 years ago. Some vocabulary suspected of going back to their original language has been recovered. Around 4,500 years ago, the Mon-Khmer-speakers were themselves pushed aside by Malay newcomers who today dominate the peninsula south of the Thai border. Oddly enough, the Semang and some Veddoid tribal groups have retained their Mon-Khmer languages until recently despite the social and cultural pressures to adopt Malay.

All Negrito groups are seriously threatened by cultural extinction through the destruction of their environment, by population pressures from their neighbours and by increasingly aggressive cultural influences from the outside world. The distribution of isolated pockets of Negrito and related groups along the entire peninsula (see map below) in the 1920s gives an inkling of their former domination of the peninsula before the Mon-Khmer and Malay settlers arrived.

Our linguistic correspondent, Timothy Usher has spotted a most interesting correspondence between two Semang and Andamanese words. We hope that other linguists will sit up and take note. He writes (dated 24th June 2003):

A number of Semang words are suspected of reflecting an earlier substrate. I'd like to point out that two of these not only match Great Andamanese words, but even show the same initial correspondence:

jebeg "bad" S..Andaman *jabVg [S.Andaman *j < G. And *ch] (e.g. Bea jabag-)

jekob "snake" G.Andamanese *chokbV "turtle" (e.g. Bea jabga).

There are three non-nasal stop prosodies in G.Andaman, plain voiceless, plain voiced and a third which is aspirated in Kora, voiced in S.Andaman and plain voiceless in C.Andaman, Kede and Cari (although it's possible that Portman simply failed to identify the distinction). I have treated the third as aspirated after Kora, but there is no real way to tell from internal evidence alone. The point here is that these Semang words are displaying the S.Andaman correspondence.

For those wishing to dig much deeper into all aspects of the Semang and other Malaysian Negrito groups, we can recommend I.H.N. Evans, The Negritos of Malaya, Cambridge, 1937. This is not light bedside reading but contains a vast amount of information. Despite its age it has not dated and it was researched while the Semang were still a living culture.

 

 

Negritos and Negritoids in the Malay peninsula. The situation shown is that of the 1920s. Since then, almost all of the populations shown here have vanished into the general population of Thailand and Malaysia, respectively, only a few Semangs and some Thai Negritos remain. (adapted from W. Nippold, Rassen- und Kulturgeschichte der Negrito-Völker Südost-Asiens, Berlin, 1936)

 

 

Details of the distribution of Semang tribes in the 1920s. (adapted from W. Nippold, Rassen- und Kulturgeschichte der Negrito-Völker Südost-Asiens, Berlin, 1936)

TRENGGANU = Malaysian state names

Menri = Semang tribal names

Sakai = other tribal names

The green line is the Thai border.

 

 

A Semang man and woman. The resemblance to Australian aborigines is remarkable.

 

 

A Semang cave painting executed and photographed in the early 1920s, showing monkeys, cars, a bow and arrow, coconut trees, etc. (from I.H.N. Evans, The Negritos of Malaya, Cambridge 1937).

 

 

The standard world- traveller's photograph of the time: Lord Moyne between two Negritos (from Lord Moyne, Walkabout: A Journey in Lands between the Pacific and Indian Ocean. London 1938). 

   

 

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