“Sri Lanka’s first aborigines with continuous lineage are the Tamil people. It is not precisely known when they came to the island, but perhaps as many as 5000 years ago.”
—————This is nonsense.
There was no Tamil language or Tamil identity that long ago.
The true aboriginals are a tribe of hunter/gatherers (the Attho) now occupying a tiny part of the islands southeast.
The predominant majority of all major nationalities are from India or with some Arab ancestry. The ones with European ancestry have been driven away to Australia.

“In 1939, a Tamil leader, G.G. Ponnambalam, spoke against the common Sinhalese notion, taken from the Mahavamsa, that their language should be the only official language and Buddhism the only official religion. Angry at the speech, Sinhalese mobs bashed and killed many Tamils. This time the British stopped the riots, but the roots to the upcoming 26-year long civil war had been laid.”
————This IS NEWS or more correctly FICTION.
There was only a Sinhala Muslim riot in 1915 under the British, where the Muslims were the victims. the British sided with the Muslim victims ad the main Tamil leader pleased for the Sinhalese offenders and blames the Muslims.

Posing the national question as a Sinhala-Tamil issue is fundamentally flawed. the call for Eelam was an opportunist elitist stunt that brought tragedy to the Tamils.
Sinhala chauvinism needs to be faught not by anrtaonising the ordinary Sinhalese masses, which the Tamil leaders did all along and the LTTE by attacking Sinhalese civilians in ‘retalliatory’ attacks.