Akar Nusa
Stand on a beach in Terengganu and look east. The water looks endless. Now picture the same view about 20,000 years ago. The sea is gone. In its place there is a wide, green plain, with rivers winding across it toward a far-off shore.
The story
During the last Ice Age, so much water was locked up in ice that the sea fell by about 120 metres. When the sea fell, the shallow floor of the South China Sea and the Java Sea became dry land. Scientists call this great land Sundaland, after the Sunda Shelf. It joined the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra, Java and Borneo.
Maps made by the biologist Harold Voris show where the shorelines lay when the sea was 75, 100 and 120 metres lower than today. They also show the great rivers that ran across the plain. The maps are held by the Field Museum in Chicago and may be used for teaching.
Then the ice melted and the sea came back. Sea level did not rise smoothly. One study of mud cores from the Sunda Shelf found a burst of rise between 14,600 and 14,300 years ago, as much as 16 metres in about 300 years. Over several thousand years, the plain shrank, the rivers drowned, and the hills became islands. By about 8,000 years ago, most of the shelf was under water.
People lived through this. Genetic scientists say that human presence on the shelf goes back at least 40,000 years, and that the Negrito peoples of today, in the Philippines, Peninsular Malaysia and the Andaman Islands, descend from the first people of Sundaland. Imagine families moving inland, over generations, as the coast crept closer. Nobody saw the whole flood. Each family saw only its own shoreline move.
Where you can still see it today
- On a map of the seabed. The shallow Sunda Shelf is easy to see on any chart. The sea around Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo is shallow. Beyond the shelf it drops away.
- In the islands. Many islands off the Peninsula were once hills on the old plain.
- On a map. The Field Museum maps let you trace the old shorelines and rivers yourself.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
A region estimate can show which parts of the world your family DNA looks most like. It cannot show where a family lived 20,000 years ago. The people of Sundaland spread in many directions as the sea rose, and their descendants mixed with later newcomers.
Some very old mother and father lines in the region may reach back to this time. DNA alone cannot pin them to a particular valley on the drowned plain.
As always, DNA cannot decide race, religion or bumiputera status. It does not tell you that your family belongs to one particular community. Sundaland is a shared story, because the first people there are among the ancestors of many Malaysians.
