Unpredictable and uneven, sailing had long been the better option. But for Sri Lanka’s first settlers – who had still to master boats – a short walk from India was all it took.

 And walking was what they did: Palaeolithic and later Mesolithic migrants from the Indian mainland who strolled across, their effortless trek belying the extreme complexity that, hundreds of years later, would colour Sri Lanka’s relationship with India – from war, intermarriage, Buddhism itself, to the borrowing of kings and armies.

Since Jurassic times, some 200 million years ago, Sri Lanka had, as part of India, broken off from the great Gondwana supercontinent that had formed 100 million years earlier in the Triassic era. Adam’s Bridge became the sole point of access to the far south, but by 7,500 BCE, it was almost impassable. 

As successive mini-ice ages wavered one way and then another and sea levels rose or fell over the years, the bridge was laid bare at least 17 times. Until then, this roughly 100-kilometre-wide, 50-kilometre-long finger of land had been so effective a crossing that it even bore rivers across it, explaining the similarities between the island’s freshwater fish and those of India. 

And not just fish.  Plants, animals, all flocked over, whilst they still could.  Some were doomed to become extinct in their new home: the Sri Lankan Lion, and possibly an ancient variant of cheetah too; the unique Sri Lankan hippopotamus; two dissimilar subspecies of Rhinoceros: Sinhaleyus and Kagavena; and the bison-like Ceylon Gaur, the last recorded one living a miserable and solitary existence in the zoo of the Kandyan King, Rajasinghe II.  

And with them all came unknown numbers of prehistoric men and women, sauntering south in search of a better life – an ambition not that dissimilar to that of the many tourists who decant into Colombo’s Bandaranaike airport today.

Beguiling hints of these earliest inhabitants are still only just emerging. Excavations conducted in 1984 by Prof. S. Krishnarajah near Point Pedro, northeast of Jaffna, revealed Stone Age tools and axes dating to between 500,000 and 1.6 million years ago. As the fossil record demonstrates, the land they inhabited was ecologically richer and more dramatic than it is today, teeming with wildlife still found in Sri Lanka.

Hundreds of millennia later, one of their Stone Age descendants left behind the most anatomically perfect modern human remains yet uncovered on the island.

Balangoda Man, as he was to be named, was found in the hills south of Horton Plains inland from Matara, a short walk from the birthplace of Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the “weeping widow” who ran independent Sri Lanka with steely determination for almost 20 years. His complete 30,000-year-old skeleton is bewitchingly life-like.

Probing his remains, scientists have concluded that Balangoda Man and his heirs were eager consumers of raw meat, from snails and snakes to elephants. And artistic, too, as evidenced by the ornamental fish bones, seashell beads, and pendants left behind.

Across the island, similar finds are being uncovered, pointing to a sparse but widespread population of hunter-gatherers living in caves – such as Batadomba and Aliga. The tools and weapons found in these caves, made of quartz crystal and flint, are well ahead of such technological developments in Europe, which date from around 10,000 BCE, compared to 29,000 BCE in Sri Lanka.

The island’s Stone Age hunter-gatherers made the transition to a more settled lifestyle well ahead of time.

By at least 17,000-15,000 BCE, Sri Lanka’s original hunter-gatherers had taken to growing oats and barley on what is now Horton Plains, thousands of years before it even began in that fulcrum of early global civilisation - Mesopotamia.

Astonishingly, their direct descendants, the Veddas, are still alive today, making up less than 1% of the island’s total population, an aboriginal community with strong animist beliefs that has, against all odds, retained a distinctive identity.  Leaner, and darker than modern Sri Lankans, their original religion - cherishing demons, and deities - was associated with the dead and the certainty that the spirits of relatives killed can cause good or bad outcomes. Their language, unique to them, is now almost – but not quite - extinct. Their DNA almost exactly matches that of Balangoda Man.

Barely a couple of competent arrow shots away from where Balangoda Man lay down and died is Kiripokunahela, a flat-topped rocky hill.  The spot, at first sight apparently wholly unremarkable, presents to the adventurous traveller (for to get to the site requires a willingness to hike far in hot sun whilst constantly checking a compass), what is quite possibly the island’s first and most eminent art gallery.

Hidden in a shallow cave, the most minimalist of minimalist salons, a leopard faces off against a man riding an elephant.  Painted in a thick white paste, this infinitely ageless portraiture has defied most scientific analysis.  All its admirers seem to agree that it is the work of tribes that predated and, most likely, gave rise to the Veddas of Lenama. 

This most singular of all Vedda tribes is famous for having been later annihilated by the Lenama leopards, as a punishment ordered by the Murugan god of Kataragama for crimes and wickedness now long since forgotten.  Only one person is said to have survived the devastation; his testament, passed down through his ancestors, recalls leopards far bigger than those familiar to the region, with stripes not just spots, reddish fur, and massive paws.  

Curiously, the animal’s reddish fur was later also witnessed by Hugh Neville, the impossibly Renaissance civil servant and scholar of anthropology, archaeology, botany, ethnology, folklore, geography, geology, history, mythology, palaeography, philology, and zoology. Encountering the beast in the 1880s, he observed that it “stood higher than any I have seen before and was remarkably thin. The tail was of the full length and unusually long.. While the fur was of a dark tawny orange with no appearance of spots”.

Neville is also the only reliable source for the Nittaewo, said to be a diminutive and still earlier version of the Vedda, standing between three to four feet in height, covered in reddish hair like tiny Yetis, and whose language amounted to a sort of burbling, or birds' twittering. Neville noted that their name may have derived from the Singhala word "nigadiwa" used to describe the primate tribes that predated Prince Vijaya. 

Whatever the Nittaewo’s distant ancestral relationship to the Vedda, it was insufficient to secure their ultimate survival.  Neville recounts that the last members of this miniature race were genocidally suffocated by smoke forced into their cave over three days by the Vedda themselves sometime around 1800.

Successful for a time, the early Vedda tribes terrified and excited island visitors.

It was the early Vedda tribes of Yaksha and Naga that Fa-Hsien, the 5th-century CE traveller, had in mind when he conjured up his fable of early Sri Lanka in his book  “A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms,” a colourful travelogue that rivets the early archaeological origins of the country to fl...