clearly show that their ancestors were once inhabitants of the plains, and took up their permanent abodes on the hills in order to escape the ravages of frequent wars and plunders or religious persecution by ambitious or fanatic rulers.

     Dr.A. Ayappan, Secretary, Aboriginal Tribes Welfare Enquiry Committee. 1946, writes on the subject as follows: -

                                       Flesh of our own Flesh

     “The so-called aboriginal tribes are wrongly believed to be different from the plains populations in ethnical and racial origins; while a very small percentage of some insignificant tribes such as the Kadars of the Anamalais show the fizzly hair - the individuals with this characteristic can be counted on one's fingers - the majority of the tribes are for racial purposes indistinguishable from the plainsmen in the adjoining regions. A Chenchu or Konda Reddi or Koya cannot be distinguished by any bodily peculiarities from the plains Andhra, if he were dressed in the plains fashion and spoke without his dialectical peculiarities. The popular idea still propagated in our school books that the hill tribes are the “Kolarians” is all absurd, and the earlier our children are told that the hill tribes are our own kith and kin, lost and stagnating in the jungles, the better for them from the scientific point of view and also for the tribes to whom such a belief has done a good deal of unintended injustice.

     “It is not necessary for the purposes of this report to go into the historical speculations about origins, ancient Indian races and race contact and clashes. At present the differences between the plainsmen and the tribes are chiefly in economic matters. Some of our tribes are still in the primitive stage of food-gathering, but fortunately food-gathering tribes are few in number; there are some other tribes who have learnt only cultivation with hoes, and are slowly taking to plough cultivation. These simple tribesmen were following their own primitive modes of life when the exploitation of the forest started on a wide scale. In several districts, for example, Kurnool and Cuddapah, extensive areas of forest were cleared in the course of the last two hundred years to the economic detriment of the Province and indirectly of the