Akar Nusa
A traveller in the old forests of Southeast Asia meets a stranger who looks a little different. They share a fire, perhaps a child. The two groups are cousins who split from one another long ago. A small thread from that meeting still runs through the DNA of people alive today.
The story
We belong to one species, but we were not the only kind of human on Earth. In Europe and western Asia lived the Neandertals, who disappeared about 30,000 years ago. In Asia lived another group, the Denisovans, first known from remains in Siberia.
In 2010, a team in Germany and elsewhere published a first draft of the Neandertal genome. They compared it with people from several parts of the world. They found that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with people outside Africa than with people in sub-Saharan Africa. This means the meeting with Neandertals happened early, in the ancestors of non-Africans, before those groups spread across Eurasia.
Denisovans are more complicated. A 2011 study looked at 33 more populations in Asia and Oceania. It found Denisovan ancestry in Aboriginal Australians, in people of Near Oceania, in east Indonesians and in the Mamanwa, a group in the Philippines. It did not find it in mainland East Asians, in western Indonesians, or in the Jehai, a Semang group from Malaysia.
The authors argue that this pattern means the meeting with Denisovans most likely took place in Southeast Asia itself. It also means archaic humans must have lived across a huge range, from Siberia to the tropics.
In 2021 another team studied 118 ethnic groups of the Philippines. They found that the Ayta Magbukon carry the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world, about 30 to 40 percent more than Australians and Papuans. They suggest several archaic groups once lived in the Philippines, and that this ancestry came from separate meetings.
Remember, the amounts are small. These stories are about tiny pieces of DNA.
Where you can still see it today
- In our bodies, very quietly. Small archaic pieces sit scattered in the genomes of many people.
- In museums and caves. Fossils of early humans in the region show how many kinds of people once lived here. See the Lenggong and Niah stories.
- In the Philippines and Oceania. Research with local communities continues to add to the picture.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
This is a story told by the whole genome, not by one mother line or father line. A region estimate is the closest kind of result. It looks at many places in your DNA at once.
Different peoples carry different amounts, and in Malaysia the findings are still thin. The Jehai result comes from one study. Nobody should read these numbers as a ranking of peoples. DNA cannot decide race, religion or bumiputera status. It shows that we all share old, tangled roots.
