Akar Nusa
A fishing boat in the Straits at dawn. Two thousand years ago, and today, it could sit beside a trader's ship carrying cloth from India or porcelain from China.
The story
Malaysia has been a meeting place for a very long time.
The first people. Modern humans reached Southeast Asia perhaps 50,000 years ago. Scientists who studied the Orang Asli (the first peoples of the peninsula) found several different groups, and evidence of more than one wave of movement into the region over many thousands of years.
Farmers and sailors. Later, groups from the Asian mainland and from the islands came. One study of Malaysian indigenous groups suggests a movement from Indochina or South China about 30,000 to 10,000 years ago, before the better-known Austronesian expansion. Austronesian speakers, who sailed and farmed, are linked with many peoples of the islands, including the Malays.
Traders and settlers. For about 2,000 years the Straits of Melaka carried goods and people between India, China, the Middle East and the islands. Merchants, monks, sailors and families settled and married locally.
Then more. In the last few hundred years more Chinese and Indian families arrived, and peoples from across the archipelago, such as Javanese, Bugis and Minangkabau, joined the story.
Where you can still see it today
In names, food, festivals and languages. In a family where a grandparent speaks Hokkien, another speaks Tamil, a cousin married a Kadazan or an Iban, and the kitchen uses ingredients from all of them.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
A large study of Asia found that DNA follows geography and language, with plenty of mixing between neighbours. Southeast Asia is described as a major source of the variation seen in East Asia.
In Malaysians we have tested, mother lines and father lines come from many places. Ones you may meet include M21 (One of Southeast Asia's oldest lines), M7 (The line of the eastern seas), B4 (The seafarers' line), R9 (An old Southeast Asian line), and for men O-M119 (The seafarers' father line), O-M268 (The line of the rice lands), O-M324 (China's most common father line) and H-M69 (An old line of India).
DNA cannot say who is more Malaysian than anyone else, and does not decide race, faith or status. See "Why DNA does not prove race, religion or bumiputera status".
