Akar Nusa
A woman sits by a fire at the edge of a shallow sea. She is not thinking about Africa, or about us. She is thinking about tomorrow's food and her small daughter. Tens of thousands of years later, her daughter's line will reach a land that is now called Malaysia.
The story
Every person alive today shares family with people who lived in Africa. Our species began there. The mother-line (mitochondrial DNA) studies of the 1980s, led by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson, first showed this. They found that all the mother-line DNA they tested came from one woman who probably lived about 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa. She was not the only woman alive then. She is simply the one whose line survived to everyone today.
Later work made the picture sharper. In 2012 a large team rebuilt the whole mother-line tree from thousands of complete mitochondrial genomes. The tree has deep branches in Africa. All the lines found outside Africa grew from a small number of those branches.
Then came the journey out. Scientists studying small, old communities in Southeast Asia found that the mother lines there point to one main dispersal from Africa, most likely along the southern coast. The route ran through India and on into Southeast Asia and Australia. The main push from India to Australia was fast. It probably took only a few thousand years, about 65,000 years ago.
Many other findings give a similar overall picture, though details differ. For example, there may have been small early journeys that did not last. Scholars still talk about dates and routes. What is not argued is the home: Africa.
So the first message of this site is simple. Before any of the stories about Malay, Chinese, Indian, Iban, Kadazan or Orang Asli families, there was one older story. All of us are cousins on that very long road.
Where you can still see it today
You will not find a monument to this journey. You can see it in a few small ways.
- In a classroom or museum. The Smithsonian Human Origins Program has a public guide to the African origin of our species,.
- In the shape of the coast. The southern route followed shorelines. The sea was lower then, so those old coasts now lie under water. The story called "Sundaland" on this site tells that part.
- In the faces around you. People in Malaysia look different from each other, but the differences are small compared with what we share.
- In a simple fact about our bodies. Skin colour, height and many other traits change gently from place to place. They do not draw sharp lines between peoples.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
Your mother line and your father line each follow one thread back through time. Every mother line in the world, including every one found in Malaysia, joins the great African trunk. Every father line does the same. Our free family lines pages show where your own thread sits on the tree and which parts of Asia it is most often found in today.
What DNA cannot do is decide who you are. A line tells you about one thread among thousands of ancestors. It does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status, and it does not prove which community your family belongs to. Those are matters of family, culture, law and your own choice, not of one DNA marker.
Dates from DNA are estimates. When you see "about 60,000 years", read it as a range.
