Akar Nusa
In a laboratory, a researcher holds a tiny piece of bone no bigger than a grain of rice. Inside it, protected for thousands of years, are fragments of DNA from a person who lived in what is now Vietnam. For the first time, we can listen to the past directly.
The story
For a long time, scientists could only use the DNA of living people to guess at the past. That is a bit like guessing a film's plot from its last scene. Ancient DNA lets us see earlier scenes.
In 2018, two large studies in the journal Science changed the picture of Southeast Asia. One team sequenced 26 ancient genomes, from Southeast Asia and one from Japan. They found that two groups both contributed to the people of today. One was the Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers, who lived in the region for a very long time. The other was farming people from East Asia, who spread south from about 4,000 years ago. Later movements also affected the islands and Vietnam.
The other study, by Mark Lipson and colleagues, looked at 18 individuals from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, between 4,100 and 1,700 years ago. Early farmers at Man Bac in Vietnam show a mix of southern Chinese farmer ancestry and deeply different hunter-gatherer ancestry. This pattern is typical of speakers of Austroasiatic languages, a family that includes the languages of many Orang Asli communities. By the Bronze Age, the people of Vietnam and Myanmar looked more like their neighbours today, which means more newcomers had arrived.
Closer to home, a 2022 study sequenced the whole genomes of Indigenous Malaysians. It found that Malaysian Negritos can be described as a mix of Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers, and that Indigenous groups came from at least three ancestral populations.
The big lesson is that the story is layered. There was no single moment of arrival. Different peoples came at different times, and they mixed. In 2014, Joseph Pickrell and David Reich pointed out that this makes today's map an unreliable guide to the past.
Where you can still see it today
- In the languages. Aslian (Austroasiatic) languages spoken by many Orang Asli communities, and Malay and other Austronesian languages, reflect different layers of the story.
- In museums. The Lenggong Valley Archaeological Gallery in Perak and the Sarawak Museum show finds from the very old layers.
- In the food and farming. Rice and other crops belong to the farming wave.
- In the variety of Malaysian faces and families. The mixing continues.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
Your mother line and father line each follow one thread. Some threads belong to very old hunter-gatherer lines, others to farmer lines, others to island lines. Your region estimate adds a wider picture across all your ancestors.
DNA cannot tell you which wave your family arrived in, or decide race, religion or bumiputera status. Ancient DNA shows that today's communities are the result of mixing over thousands of years. No community is "pure", and none is less rooted for that reason.
