The Hindu Business Line : Andaman tribes past links established

EVEN as Indian scientists are succeeding in bridging the lineage and past of the ancient Andaman and Nicobar tribes to the cradle of evolution of human civilisation — Africa, through path-breaking DNA studies, the future survival of the tribes looks anything but bleak.

The `Out of Africa' theory, which shows how the early human migrated to the rest of the world locales, also gets corroborated, with a study done by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, establishing that the tribes on Andaman and Nicobar, were the first and oldest migrants to step out of East Africa.

The ancestors of the Andaman and Nicobar tribes can be linked to these early people who took the sea route from Africa towards the Indian sub-continent, but due to a quirk of fate, got isolated on the islands about 60,000-70,000 years ago, and thereafter have been inhabiting the beautiful Indian Ocean islands, explained Lalji Singh, Director and leader of the scientific team.

This conclusion has been arrived at, after painstaking study and analysis of the mitochondrial DNA (15,659 base pairs) of five Onge's, five Great Andamanese and five Nicobarese, over several years.

The study published in the latest issue of Science is path-breaking in terms of India's contributions in using DNA (deoxyribonucleacacid) studies to set the `jigsaw puzzle,' in human evolution in the correct historical perspective, Lalji Singh told newspersons here.

However, the big question mark, on these vanishing tribes, which are the very few living links to the past, is their survival in the face of many challenges.

"The tribes on Andaman and Nicobar islands are more threatened now than anytime in history," said the CCMB Director.

On one hand, the hunter-gatherer tribes are getting squeezed with development and human activity, as their natural habitats (forests) get shrunk, and on the other, the inbreeding (which is responsible for several animal species going extinct) is telling on their depleting numbers.

"In my discussion with the Onge's, the tribes said they were happy going back to the forests and shifting to settlements than the onward march to towns," he said.

Braving disease, vagaries of nature, inbreeding and the recent tsunami, the population of the Andaman and Nicobar tribes now stands at: Onge (98); Greater Andamanese (20); Shompens (180); Jarawa (200); Sentenelese (250) and Nicobarese (22,000), Dr Thangaraj, one of the main researchers in the study said.

While the CCMB study concurred with the `Out of Africa' origins of the Andaman and Nicobar tribes, it threw up a surprise as far as the origins and links of tribes of mainland India.

"About 6,500 samples of the mainland tribes studied did not throw up any genetic match with the Onge's or the Great Andamanese, leading us to conclude that they are indeed of different lineage, and hence, require a detailed mitochondrial analysis to place the correct links and context to their evolution," Lalji Singh said.

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