Akar Nusa
## A short opening scene Picture a kitchen table in any Malaysian town. A grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter are passing a plate. None of them has ever counted, but all three carry the same tiny piece of DNA, handed down from mother to child, and from that mother's mother, further back than any family record.
## The story Everyone has a mother line. It follows your mother, her mother, and so on back through time. Scientists sort these lines into families, each with a short letter-and-number name, using one shared family tree (van Oven and Kayser, 2009).
We have read the mother line of 10,350 Malaysians we have tested. Here is what we found.
The three biggest families are close together. M7 has 1,261 testers (12.2%). B4 has 1,238 (12.0%). F1 has 1,145 (11.1%). Together that is 35 in every 100.
The next seven are smaller. D4 (738, 7.1%), B5 (683, 6.6%), D5 (412, 4.0%), N9 (329, 3.2%), R9 (299, 2.9%), F2 (287, 2.8%) and M8 (285, 2.8%). The top ten families hold about 65 in every 100 testers.
There are many small families too. We saw 183 families in all, and 594 more exact branches inside them. 116 families have five or more testers. 67 families have fewer than 5 testers each, so we do not show their numbers.
Most are read with confidence. 9,768 testers (94.4%) have a clear result. 582 (5.6%) are marked "likely". None were left unread.
By where each family is most common today, about 82 in 100 testers carry a family best known in East and Southeast Asia. About 5 in 100 carry families best known in South Asia, and about 2 in 100 carry families best known in West Asia or Europe. A small number carry families best known from Africa. About 8 in 100 belong to wide families (M, N and R) that we cannot place in one region.
## Where you can still see it today This is a map of movement, not of a food or a festival. Yet it fits what Malaysians know from daily life: families who came by sea, by river and by road over thousands of years, and who met here.
## What DNA can tell, and what it cannot A mother line tells you about one thin thread: your mother's mother's mother, and so on. It says nothing about your other ancestors. Most of your family tree is not in it.
It does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status. A family name such as M7 is where a line is most common today. It is not a label for a person or a community.
These testers are not a perfect picture of all Malaysians. People chose to buy a kit. Some communities and some states are covered more than others. Read these numbers as "Malaysians we have tested", never as "Malaysia".
## Read more - van Oven and Kayser 2009, Updated comprehensive phylogenetic tree of global human mtDNA variation, Human Mutation: https://doi.org/10.1002/humu.20921 - PhyloTree, the mother-line family tree: https://www.phylotree.org
