Note 3 — INTRODUCTION

The aborigines of the Andaman Islands have been in their present home for a great many centuries. It is not possible to say with any degree of certainty how or when they first reached the islands. Geological and other evidence would seem to show that the Andamans were united to the mainland along the line of the Arakan Fold in later Tertiary times, but even this is perhaps not quite certain3. In any case the period of past land connection seems to be so remote that it had probably ceased to exist at the time when the islands were peopled by the ancestors of the present natives. If the ancestors of the Andamanese reached the islands at the time of a past land connection, they can only have done so from the Arakan region of Burma. On the other hand, if they travelled by sea they must almost certainly have started from the Burmese coast (Pegu or Arakan). The north-east monsoon would drift them thence on to the Andamans. It is conceivable that they might have travelled from Sumatra by way of the Nicobars, but the north-east monsoon would have opposed their progress in this direction, while the south-west monsoon would have driven them to the east of the Andamans4. It is hardly possible to imagine them coming from the Malay Peninsula across the wide stretch of the Andaman Sea. The balance of probability is in favour of the view that the Andamans were peopled, either by sea or by land, from the region of Lower Burma.