Semang

The Semang Negritos persisted as hunter-gatherers trading with neighboring farmers but adopted an Austroasiatic language from those farmers—much as, we shall see, Philippine Negrito and African Pygmy hunter-gatherers adopted languages from their farmer trading partners.

Just three relict groups of hunter-gatherers—the Semang Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islanders, and the Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka—remain to suggest that tropical Southeast Asia’s former inhabitants may have been dark-skinned and curly-haired, like modern New Guineans and unlike the light-skinned, straight-haired South Chinese and the modern tropical Southeast Asians who are their offshoots.

In the Malay Peninsula they are called Semang.

Geologically, the islands are connected with the opposite mainland, so that in remote times migration was probably possible; and we find in the Malay Peninsula, and in the Philippines, which were at one time connected with it, aborigines who—known by various names, such as Semang, Jakun, etc., and Aeta—are the nearest existing relatives of the Andamanese.

All possess the bow and arrow, though only the Semang and Aeta use poison.