New study decodes when the Nicobarese people came to the island Premium

Discover the genetic heritage of the Nicobar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean through a recent study in human genetics.

More than half a million years ago, one of humans’ ancestors took a bold step and ventured beyond Africa, the cradle of humankind, in search of greener pastures. Since then humans have explored every habitable corner of the globe, often driven by the need to find new sources of food and to escape diseases and natural disasters.

Researchers have documented many migrations in great detail in the historical and archaeological records — but even now, some chapters are missing from this epic tale.

One part of the missing story was recently published in the European Journal of Human Genetics. Scientists from India have reported finding the genetic heritage of the people of the Nicobar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

The team conducted a detailed analysis of genetic data collected from 1,559 individuals across South and Southeast Asia. They found ancestral ties between the Nicobarese and the Htin Mal community, a population from the Laos-Thailand region.

The Nicobarese were also found to have retained their Austroasiatic language roots — a language family spanning Southeast Asia — of the Khmuic branch.

“Almost 20 years ago, we collected DNA from tribes in the Andaman and Nicobar region. We could not gather much information from DNA for the Nicobarese population but we related them to some South Asian groups and estimated their age to be around 11,500 years,” Kumarasamy Thangaraj, of the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.

He co-led the study with Gyaneshwer Chaubey of Banaras Hindu University.