The Paliyan, or Pulliyar, Palaiyar or Pazhaiyarare, are a group of around 9,500 formerly nomadic Dravidian tribals living in the South Western Ghats montane rain forests in South India, especially in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. They are traditional nomadic hunter-gatherers, honey hunters and foragers. Yams are their major food source. In the early part of the 20th century the Paliyans dressed scantily and lived in rock crevices and caves. Most have now transformed into traders of forest products, food cultivators and beekeepers. Some work intermittently as wage laborers, mostly on plantations. They
The Paliyan, or Pulliyar, Palaiyar or Pazhaiyarare, are a group of around 9,500 formerly nomadic Dravidian tribals living in the South Western Ghats montane rain forests in South India, especially in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. They are traditional nomadic hunter-gatherers, honey hunters and foragers. Yams are their major food source. In the early part of the 20th century the Paliyans dressed scantily and lived in rock crevices and caves. Most have now transformed into traders of forest products, food cultivators and beekeepers. Some work intermittently as wage laborers, mostly on plantations. They are a Scheduled Tribe. They speak a Dravidian language, Paliyan, closely related to Tamil.
== Past studies == thumb|right| Paliyan woman & children "Thurston,(1909) quoting from the writing of Rev. F. Dahman.(1908) describes Palians as nomadic tribe, who for the most part rove in small parties through the jungle clad gorges (Sholas) that fringe the upper Palnis plateau. Pate (1916) describes Paliyans as a "Very backward caste who live-in small scattered parties amid the jungles of the upper Palnis and the Varrushanadu valley". Gardner describes Paliyans as moderately dark in complexion, short in stature, and their physical characteristics fall within the range of South and South East Asian. Peter M. Gardner, the foremost English Paliyan Author, states that Paliyans have distinctive ways: - To learn subsistence skills with minimal formal verbal instruction. - To ascertain themselves what others denote by terms – in the face of substantial interpersonal knowledge variation. - To "know" by testing empirically the validity of theories (e.g., on the condition of a hunted animal)
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).