The term ''Negrito'' (; ) refers to several diverse ethnic groups who inhabit isolated parts of
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...
and the
Andaman Islands
The Andaman Islands () are an archipelago, made up of 200 islands, in the northeastern Indian Ocean about southwest off the coasts of Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Region. Together with the Nicobar Islands to their south, the Andamans serve as a mari ...
. Populations often described as Negrito include: the
Andamanese peoples
The Andamanese are the various indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal. The Andamanese are a designated Scheduled Castes and Sch ...
(including the
Great Andamanese, the
Onge, the
Jarawa, and the
Sentinelese
The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are Indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Designated a particularly vulnerable tribal group a ...
) of the Andaman Islands, the
Semang peoples (among them, the
Batek people
The Batek (or Bateq) people are an indigenous Orang Asli people (numbering about 1,519 in 2000) belonging to the Semang group, who live in the rainforest of peninsular Malaysia. As a result of encroachment, they now primarily inhabit the Taman N ...
) of
Peninsular Malaysia
Peninsular Malaysia, historically known as Malaya and also known as West Malaysia or the Malaysian Peninsula, is the western part of Malaysia that comprises the southern part of the Malay Peninsula on Mainland Southeast Asia and the list of isla ...
, the
Maniq people
The Maniq or Mani are a Negrito ethnic group of Thailand. They are more widely known in Thailand as the ''Sakai'' (), a controversial derogatory term meaning 'barbarism'. They are the only Negritos in Thailand and speak a variety of related Aslia ...
of
Southern Thailand
Southern Thailand (formerly Southern Siam and Tambralinga) is the southernmost cultural region of Thailand, separated from Central Thailand by the Kra Isthmus.
Geography
Southern Thailand is on the Malay Peninsula, with an area of around , bo ...
, as well as the
Aeta of
Luzon
Luzon ( , ) is the largest and most populous List of islands in the Philippines, island in the Philippines. Located in the northern portion of the List of islands of the Philippines, Philippine archipelago, it is the economic and political ce ...
, the
Ati and
Tumandok of
Panay
Panay is the sixth-largest and fourth-most populous island in the Philippines, with a total land area of and a total population of 4,542,926, as of 2020 census. Panay comprises 4.4 percent of the entire population of the country. The City of Il ...
, the
Mamanwa
The Lumad are a group of Austronesian indigenous peoples in the southern Philippines. It is a Cebuano term meaning "native" or "indigenous". The term is short for Katawhang Lumad (Literally: "indigenous people"), the autonym officially ado ...
of
Mindanao
Mindanao ( ) is the List of islands of the Philippines, second-largest island in the Philippines, after Luzon, and List of islands by population, seventh-most populous island in the world. Located in the southern region of the archipelago, the ...
, and about 30 other officially recognized
ethnic groups in the Philippines
The Philippines is inhabited by more than 182 Ethnolinguistic group, ethnolinguistic groups, many of which are classified as "Indigenous Peoples" under the country's Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act of 1997. Traditionally-Muslim minorities from ...
.
Etymology
The word ''Negrito,'' the Spanish
diminutive
A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle s ...
of ''
negro
In the English language, the term ''negro'' (or sometimes ''negress'' for a female) is a term historically used to refer to people of Black people, Black African heritage. The term ''negro'' means the color black in Spanish and Portuguese (from ...
'', is used to mean "little black person." This usage was coined by 16th-century Spanish
missionaries
A missionary is a member of a religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thomas Hale 'On Being a Miss ...
operating in the Philippines, and was borrowed by other European travellers and colonialists across Austronesia to label various peoples perceived as sharing relatively small physical stature and dark skin.
Contemporary usage of an alternative Spanish epithet, ''Negrillos'', also tended to bundle these peoples with the
pygmy peoples
In anthropology, pygmy peoples are ethnic groups whose average height is unusually short. The term pygmyism is used to describe the phenotype of endemic short stature (as opposed to disproportionate dwarfism occurring in isolated cases in a po ...
of
Central Africa
Central Africa (French language, French: ''Afrique centrale''; Spanish language, Spanish: ''África central''; Portuguese language, Portuguese: ''África Central'') is a subregion of the African continent comprising various countries accordin ...
on the basis of perceived similarities in stature and complexion.
[ (Historically, the label ''Negrito'' has also been used to refer to African pygmies.) The appropriateness of bundling peoples of different ]ethnicities
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people with shared attributes, which they collectively believe to have, and long-term endogamy. Ethnicities share attributes like language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, rel ...
by similarities in stature and complexion has been called into question.[
]
Population
There are over 100,000 Negritos in the Philippines. In 2010, there were 50,236 Aeta people in the Philippines. There were 55,473 Ati people (2020 census). Officially, Malaysia had approximately 4,800 Negrito (Semangs).[ ] This number increases if we include some of the populations or individual groups among Orang Asli
The Orang Asli are a Homogeneity and heterogeneity, heterogeneous Indigenous peoples, indigenous population forming a national minority in Malaysia. They are the oldest inhabitants of Peninsular Malaysia.
As of 2017, the Orang Asli accounted f ...
who have either assimilated Negrito population or have admixed origins. According to the 2006 census, the number of Orang Asli was 141,230
Andamanese of India with just c. over 500. Thailand Negrito Maniq is estimated 300, divided into several clans.[''Primal Survivor: Season 5, episode 1''] Other puts it at 382 or less than 500.
Culture
Most groups designated as "Negrito" lived as hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived Lifestyle, lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, esp ...
s, while some also used agriculture
Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created ...
, such as plant harvesting. Today most live assimilated to the majority population of their respective homeland. Discrimination and poverty
Poverty is a state or condition in which an individual lacks the financial resources and essentials for a basic standard of living. Poverty can have diverse Biophysical environmen ...
are often problems, caused either by their lower social position, their hunter-gatherer lifestyles, or both.
Origins
Based on perceived physical similarities, Negritos were once considered a single population of closely related people. However, genetic studies suggest that they consist of several separate groups descended from the same ancient East Eurasian meta-population that gave rise to modern East Asian peoples and Oceanian peoples, as well as displaying genetic heterogeneity. The Negritos form the indigenous population of Southeast Asia, but were largely absorbed by Austroasiatic- and Austronesian-speaking groups who migrated from southern East Asia into Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia with the Neolithic
The Neolithic or New Stone Age (from Ancient Greek, Greek 'new' and 'stone') is an archaeological period, the final division of the Stone Age in Mesopotamia, Asia, Europe and Africa (c. 10,000 BCE to c. 2,000 BCE). It saw the Neolithic Revo ...
expansion. The remainders form minority groups in geographically isolated regions.
Genetic studies provided mixed evidence of modern Negrito populations, with admixtures in different. Studies indicate that Negrito populations are closer to their neighboring non-Negrito communities in their paternal heritage and overall DNA on average.
It has been found that the physical and morphological phenotypes of Negritos, such as short stature, a wide and snub nose, curly hair and dark skin, "''are shaped by novel mechanisms for adaptation to tropical rainforests''" through convergent evolution
Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last comm ...
and positive selection, rather than a remnant of a shared common ancestor, as suggested previously by some researchers.
A Negrito-like population was most likely also present in Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
before the Neolithic expansion and must have persisted into historical times, as suggested by evidence from morphological features of human skeletal remains dating from around 6,000 years ago resembling Negritos (especially Aetas in northern Luzon), and further corroborated by Chinese reports from the Qing period rule of Taiwan (1684 to 1895) and from tales of Taiwanese indigenous peoples
Taiwanese indigenous peoples, formerly called Taiwanese aborigines, are the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, with the nationally recognized subgroups numbering about 600,303 or 3% of the Geography of Taiwan, island's population. This total is incr ...
about people with "dark skin, short-and-small body stature, frizzy hair, and occupation in forested mountains or remote caves".
See also
*
*
*
Notes
*
References
Further reading
* Evans, Ivor Hugh Norman. ''The Negritos of Malaya''. Cambridge ng.
Ng, ng, or NG may refer to:
* Ng (name) (吳 黄 伍), (吳 being the most common), a surname of Chinese origin
Arts and entertainment
* N-Gage (device), a handheld gaming system
* Naked Giants, Seattle rock band
* '' Spirit Hunter: NG'', a vide ...
University Press, 1937.
*
* Garvan, John M., and Hermann Hochegger. ''The Negritos of the Philippines''. Wiener Beitrage zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik, Bd. 14. Horn: F. Berger, 1964.
* Hurst Gallery. ''Art of the Negritos''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Hurst Gallery, 1987.
*
*
* Schebesta, P., & Schütze, F. (1970). ''The Negritos of Asia''. Human relations area files, 1–2. New Haven, Conn: Human Relations Area Files.
* Armando Marques Guedes (1996). ''Egalitarian Rituals. Rites of the Atta hunter-gatherers of Kalinga-Apayao, Philippines'', Social and Human Sciences Faculty, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
* Zell, Reg. ''About the Negritos: A Bibliography''. Edition blurb, 2011.
* Zell, Reg. ''Negritos of the Philippines''. The People of the Bamboo - Age - A Socio-Ecological Model. Edition blurb, 2011.
* Zell, Reg, John M. Garvan. ''An Investigation: On the Negritos of Tayabas''. Edition blurb, 2011.
External links
''Negritos of Zambales''
��detailed book written by an American at the turn of the previous century holistically describing the Negrito culture
The Southeast Asian Negrito
{{Authority control
Demographics of the Philippines
Ethnic groups in Indonesia
Ethnic groups in Malaysia
Ethnic groups in Thailand
Ethnic groups in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands
Ethnic groups in the Philippines
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia
Austronesian peoples