Negrito skull confirms Taiwan indigenous legends of ‘little Black people’

via Taiwan News, 07 October 2022: News story on the recent discovery of a pre-Austronesian burial found in Taiwan.

The discovery of a 6,000-year-old skull of a Negrito woman confirms legends by almost all of Taiwan’s Indigenous tribes of “little Black people” that span centuries.

On Oct. 4, a journal article article was published in World Archeology titled “Negritos in Taiwan and the wider prehistory of Southeast Asia: new discovery from the Xiaoma Caves.” The authors of the study report that cranial morphometric studies of a skeleton found in the Xiaoma Caves in Taitung County’s Chenggong Township “for the first time, validates the prior existence of small stature hunter-gatherers 6,000 years ago.”

With the exception of the Yami (Tao) people on Orchid Island, Taiwan’s 15 other indigenous peoples have legends about “little Black people” who were short in stature, with dark skin, and frizzy hair who lived in remote mountain areas. Some 258 accounts of these peoples by Indigenous tribes have been recorded by researchers in the Qing Dynasty, the Japanese colonial period, and since 1945.

Source: Negrito skull confirms Taiwan indigenous legends of ‘little Black people’ | Taiwan News | 2022-10-07 18:18:00