Separate Wings of the Human Family

Although they are part of a chain of islands that are closer to the Burmese mainland, the Republic of India governs the Union Territory of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.

While the islands apparently have quite lovely tourist beaches and flora, the native population makes them truly special. As V. K. Kashyap, T. Sitalaximi, B. N. Sarkar & R. Trivedi conclude in their article Molecular Relatedness of the Aboriginal Groups of Andaman and Nicobar islands with Similar Ethnic populations, "[T]he present study clearly demonstrates that the aboriginal populations of Andaman Islands - the Great Andamanese and the Jarawas [sic] constitute a distinct genetic pool that is different from the rest of the Asian and African populations suggesting that (i) they either are surviving descendents of early migrants from Africa who have remained isolated in their habitat in the Andaman Islands since their settlement, or (ii) they are the descendents of one of the founder populations of modern humans."

In plainest English, all the genetic evidence so far shows that the ancestors of the 'ethnic Andamans' separated from the remainder of humanity as its oldest branching.

Even modern African populations show less genetic variety: the genetic distance between any other two groups, for example indigenous South American populations with Khoisan or "African pygmies", is less. This suggests that their ancestors left Africa and moved through Southeast Asia and into Australia, after which a more recent African group washed through all the remaining populations.

The Andaman populations are also considered interesting because they do not have mastery of fire and rely on very basic stone and wooden tools. Their languages are also mostly a mysterious but show some characteristics that might be typologically common for cultures living in a hunter-gatherer world: there are very complex grammatical classification systems (what linguists call "genders") but words for numbers are limited to "one, couple, many, whole lotta". Andaman natives can count, of course, but they rely on tallying systems: "one hand's worth and one finger", for example.

I regret that the general story of the Andamans is typical of that of indigenous groups who have been replaced by more recent groups. Contact with outsiders, which in historical times was totally shunned for reasons of environment and temperament, means that epidemic diseases swept through the autochthonous Andamans when the British forced contact during their reign over the Indian subcontinent.

The article, one of many on the Andaman Association's website, also mentions tantalising follow-up research that should lead to some fascinating genetic insights about the history of H. sapiens sapiens: "The data on mtDNA and SNPs of Y chromosome are being compiled to further evaluate the origin and the antiquity as well as the route of migration if any, of the aboriginal populations of Andaman and Nicobar Islands."

Woop-woop!