Geneticist clarifies role of Proto-Malays in human origin

Aidila Razak 11:11AM Jan 25 2!12

"#$%R&"%' Leading Oxford University geneticist Dr Stephen Oppenheimer is taken aback by how politically charged the research into the origins of human population is in Malaysia. Most recently strong reaction had arisen over media coverage of a conference on the origins of the Malay race which marked the Orang !sli " the Senoi Semang and the #roto"Malays " as torchbearers of the modern human race.

$larifying this finding in an interview last week Oppenheimer said the Orang !sli particularly the Semang and the #roto"Malays are direct descendants of the first humans who stepped foot in Southeast !sia %then Sunda& and are 'ancestral( for east !sia and the !mericas. '#articularly the Semang and the #roto"Malay have lineages which are characteristic and very uni)ue to their own populations which clearly have a local geographic distribution. So they have been here since the original settlers... ( he said. Se)uencing random mutations in mitochondrial D*! a type of D*! inherited only from mothers Oppenheimer traces the origins of human population from the first human in !frica to the homeland of +uropeans in the !rabian gulf and to homeland of east !sians in Sunda. Oppenheimer was in ,uala Lumpur last -riday to present a paper at the Asal Usul Melayu: Induknya di Alam Melayu conference organised by the !ssociation of Malaysian !rcheologists.

.e is the author of the books /+den in the +ast0 and /Out of +den0 which details his theories on human population migration. ! graphic presentation of his research can be found here. +xcerpts of the interview follow. 1he content has been edited for language brevity and flow. Malaysiakini: (ou use your research in mitochondrial )#A to trace the origins of the human *o*ulation+ (our theory is that there ,as only one single migration out of Africa+ -te*hen .**enheimer2 1he ancestry of all humans living today is from !frica. -rom looking at the mitochondrial tree for the whole human species that is still alive today you3ll find most of the branches and roots are in !frica. 4hen you look at the rest of the world it belongs to one twig of the !frican tree. %5n order for this to happen& you will have only one exit. 5f you had two exits you would have two twigs or more twigs out of !frica. 4e don3t. 4e only see one twig represented outside of !frica the so"called L6 and its two daughter branches M and *. "n ,hat year ,as that single migration/ 5t3s possible to date the age of L6. 5t3s 78 888"98 888 or even 78 8888":8 888 years ago depending on the method that you use. So the exit from !frica is somewhere between ;; 888 and 9; 888 years ago.

!nd people are very keen to date exactly when it is. One of the very important date markers which occurred during that time between ;; 888 and 9; 888 years ago was the explosion of the 1oba volcano in *orth Sumatra. 1he 1oba volcano is <88km long 68km wide. 1hat3s where the =atak live %today&. 5t was the biggest bang in the last >.; million years. 5t affected populations throughout the world. =ut it particularly affected populations in 5ndia.

5n the book /Out of +den0 5 wrote about this. 5 suggested that the exit from !frica was before 1oba on the basis on genetics. =ut this is still a controversial area and 5 think it is an open )uestion still whether it was before 1oba or soon after but it was somewhere around ?8 888 years ago. 'here did this single grou* of a0out 25! *eo*le ,ho came out of Africa go/ 1he South coast. 1hey went to D@ibouti... and then the south !rabian coast to the Aulf but the Aulf was not there as the sea levels were right down. 1hen they went to 5ndia Sri Lanka and from there they went to the =ay of =engal and to the Malay peninsula. Southeast !sia was different then. 5nstead of islands and a long thin Malay peninsula it was a block of land... called the Sunda continent or the Sunda Shelf.

#eople who came out of !frica moved very rapidly towards there and you can tell %this& from the way the %mitochondrial D*!& tree is structured. 1hey did not stay in any one place for a very long time. 1hey moved on. 1hey left colonies all along the route. =ut the vanguard moved very rapidly over a couple of thousand years right down to =ali. 1he ancestors of the three Orang !sli groups %the Senai Semang and #roto"Malays& in the Malay peninsula arrived in the vanguard. 1hey descended from the very first people who put foot in this region in Malaya. $he $o0a eru*tion ,i*ed out *o*ulations in %ast "ndia 0ut not in -unda+ 'hat ha**ened to the ones in Africa/ 1he ones in !frica were fine. 1he ones who settled in the !rabian gulf region were probably fine but the east coast of 5ndia were severely hit. =ecause the volcano is in Sumatra and the wind was going northeast. 1he ash completely showered 5ndia. 5t3s difficult to make these estimates but <8 888 is used a lot %for the number of

survivors in Sunda&. ! small number. )id floods *ush migration out of -unda/ 5n the last <7 888 years the ice started melting and it melted very rapidly in three big events. 1he first one was <B ;88 years ago a really ma@or melt. 1he second one was << ;88 years ago and the third one 9 ;88 years ago. 5f you look at the genetic record for east !sia you3ll find that for each of these melts you will see a rapid genetic expansion. 5t3s very tempting to think that the reason they were dispersing was because the sea was moving in. 1om*aring the genetic make-u* of the Malays today and the .rang Asli ,ould you say the latter ,ould ha2e a stronger link to the original settlers/ #articularly the Semang and the #roto"Malay have lineages which are characteristic and very uni)ue to their own populations which clearly have a local geographic distribution. So they have been here since the original settlers... 1hey3ve stayed at home on the Malay peninsula. 1he Malays share some Orang !sli lineages they have some of their own uni)ue to island Southeast !sia and about half of the Malay mitochondrial lines come from 5ndonesia. !nd that3s not a big surprise in itself because we know even in the last couple of hundred years there have been immigrant populations " the =ugis the =an@a the Cawa from Sumatera the Minangkabau from Sumatra and the Dawa from Dava. 5f you look at the genetics of these people they are characteristic of where they come from. So the interchange between island Southeast !sia and the Malay peninsula is very strong but it is also very old. 5t has not @ust occurred during the neolithic %period but& goes back >8 888 years. .ne thing for certain is that -outheast Asians are 3ancestral for3 the rest of east Asia+

Ees in a sense 5 think the other way to put it is that Southeast !sia is the homeland of the dispersal of the people who went north into $hina and right into the !mericas. 1he Southeast !sians themselves are descendants of the original settlers.

5 think that the Orang !sli are slightly different in the sense that they show evidence of being in the same place right from the start. 5f one is talking about the rest of Southeast !sia including the Malays the effect of rising waters which pushed people all around in 5ndonesia has meant a lot more mixing. 5t is within Southeast !sia. 5f one takes Southeast !sia as a whole the ancestry of the Malays and 5ndonesian are @ust as old as the Orang !sli. Only the Orang !sli stayed put while the others moved around. 1here has been a view which has dominated teaching over the past >8 years that the %original& south"east !sian %settlers& were replaced by rice farmers from 1aiwan B 888 or so years ago who sailed to the #hilippines and 5ndonesia and wiped out all indigenous population there.

1he evidence for that is very very poor and the genetic evidence is almost Fero. 4e did look for good evidence of migration from 1aiwan towards the #hilippines and 5ndonesia and we found two lineages amounting to 7 percent of the population but the rest had already arrived before the neolithic %period& and not from 1aiwan. 1hey also did not come from $hina into Southeast !sia. Southeast !sia was the first to be settled. $hina was colonised from Southeast !sia rather than the other way

around. $he title of the conference 4last 5riday6 refers to the 7origins of the Malays8+ 'here do they come from/ !bout half from island Southeast !sia about the other half mainland Southeast !sia. 1here are other origins which we are doing research into right now. Ultimately they came out of !frica and their ancestors arrived here over 78 888 or more years ago. 9asically ,e3re all cousins+ $he homeland of all humans is Africa ,hile the homeland of all east Asians and the Americas is -outheast Asia+ 'here do %uro*eans come from/ 5f you ask me a single place that they come from is the region around the Aulf 5ra) and 5ran. 5t3s the eastern part of the Middle +ast. 1he people who went up to the Aulf moved later only ;8 888 years ago. 1he people who had gone to Sunda left a long time before. 1he movement to +urope was a delayed branch. #eople have got to Sunda before the ancestors of the +uropeans had even left the Aulf. 1here were a lot of fresh water lakes and was probably a very nice place to stay. :o, do you 2ie, attem*ts to reconcile the scientific findings ,ith creationism and attem*ts to find Adam insofar as human migration is concerned/ 5n my first book /+den in the +ast0 which spoke of the Sunda continent and the movement out to the #acific 5 spent the first half looking at what is called folklore which includes religious stories and how the branches of that folklore have moved in !sia and +urasia. 1here are common features of Southeast !sian folklore #acific folklore and 4estern folklore. 1oo many coincidences for it to be by chance. -or instance the story of the flood. #eople have always regarded the story of the flood to be so extraordinary to be not possibly true.

=ut geologically we know there were these floods. Aenetically we know the effect of these floods was to get people running in all directions in their boats... 1he flood was actually worse in places like the Aulf which was flat land and Southeast !sia again

%was then& a very flat continental shelf. 1he stories of the flood have families and you can look at these families geographically the same way as you look at distributions of mitochondrial D*!. 4hen you look at these stories there are some common core stories which appear in many religious texts. ! section of the Old 1estament Aenesis describes the flood and the period after the flood and the separation of population by the names of the descendants of *oah. 1hose names are still present in the language families in part of the old world. -or instance the three sons of *oah " .am Sham and Daphet. .am is !frican and one of his descendants ,ush is also !frican and we have the .amitic and ,ushitic languages in !frica... 5 don3t discount the folklore religious and non"religious as a potential source. *ot the only source as if you look at some folklore it is )uite... (chuckles) ...%but& 5 don3t discount that sort of analysis. -o ,here ,as Adam/ 'hen did the first human li2e/ 5f you talk about the source of all humankind modern humans it has to be !frica. -rom the biological definition paleontologists would say all species which names start of with homo %began& >.; million years ago. -or homo sapiens it is probably is about >88 888 years not very long and most of that time was in !frica. 1he homo sapiens in !frica replaced the humans of the previous types and the ones who left !frica replaced all the non"!fricans of the previous type. Homo sapiens are ,hat you are referring to ,hen you talk a0out modern humans+ 1hat3s right. Modern humans is a very closely related family. 4e tend to exaggerate difference between peoples... because we need to recognise people in order to behave as social animals... =ut when you look at it anatomically the differences between %those living in& different regions of the world is very small and genetic differences are also very small. So we are a very closely related family and that include the !fricans.