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Weren't the Sinhalese the earliest settlers from the north of India who brought Buddhism with them while the Tamils were the relative late comers from southern India who brought Hinduism?

Did Hinduism have its roots in Buddhism? Do the Sinhalese view Hindus as an apostate branch much as the Sunnis view the Shiite sect of Islam?

I remember reading a National Geographic article some years ago on Sri Lanka. What made it memorable is that even the warring parties interviewed couldn't explain why they were fighting.

Not exactly correct. The earliest settlers in Sri Lanka are Veddhas, these are Australoids by race (related to the aborigines of Australia and the natives of Papua New Guinea).

The Sinhalese are related to Orissa or Biharis and date their arrival to 500 BC or a bit earlier. This was just about the time of Buddhism, but before Ashoka the great spread it, so the earliest Sinhalese were Hindus. They then converted to Theravada Buddhism which is what they are even now

The Tamils came to the island about the time of Christ, when the Cholas expanded their maritime Empire. They had a different form of Hinduism

No, Hinduism does not have it's roots in Buddhism, rather it is the other way around.

Hinduism, you must understand, is not a religion in the sense that we Christians understand a religion to be -- it has no central theme or holy book. It is more like a meta-religion, a grouping of different beliefs. The earliest form was Vedic hinduism, a worship of the primitive Indo-European/Aryan gods like Indra (dra, Thor etc.) and Dyuas Pitr (Dyuas, Zeus etc.). This lastest until 700 BC when the Jains came along and changed everything (read up about the Jain religion -- it is far more austere than Buddhism).

Around 500 BC, Gautama Buddha was born in what is now the Indian state of Bihar close to Nepal and he preached a philosophy that tooks parts of hinduism and jainism

His eight-fold path, in fact, is how to escape from Hinduism's never ending cycle of reincarnation, birth and rebirth.

So, Buddhism was born from early Vedic thought and philosophy. You can say that Buddhism, Jainism and modern-day Hinduism are all sister religions derived from the Vedic religion

No, the Sinhalese do not have a sectarian hatred against Hindus, rather the discord is primarily racial: both Sinhalese and Tamils are Caucasian people, however the Sinhalese (like the people from northern and western India) are Aryans, while the Tamils are Dravidians (hypothetically related to the Sumerians and definitely related to the Harappans from the Indus valley civilisation).

Indo-Europeans/Aryans took part of the Dravidian gods and added it to their Vedic religion to make Hinduism, IMHO (modern Hindus hardly worship Indra or Surya or Varuna but worship the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vvishnu and Shiva -- Shiva, the ascetic being a figure depicted in the early Indus valley as well)