ANDAMAN: THE MISSING AFRICAN LINK - Arushi Uniyal

The Anthropologists, all the world over, stand humbled before another baffling mystery of human evolution. Where did They come from? How long have They been there? Tucked away, in the lush green tropical rainforets of the Islands of Andaman ,are a very primitive group of people who have virtually blocked out the rest of the "civilized" world, for over 4000 years. ‘The cannibals’, as Marco Polo had once branded them are characterized by their short stature, dark skin, peppercorn hair, and steatopygia[heavy back]. Andamanese come very close to African pygmies and Asian Negritos in physical description.
 

All existing models of modern human evolution , each distinct in its approach , converge to claim that the earliest of the primates had originally evolved in Africa following which there were atleast two ‘great migrations’. After the migration of the homo erectus from Africa into Europe and Asia 1.8 million years ago, there were independent transitions of the species in regional populations from the Homo erectus to the Homo sapiens. Meanwhile, the intensity of the much talked about anthropological event ,the ‘Toba volcanic eruption’
of 73,000 years ago suggests that this eruption could have killed off most of the waves of early human migrants seeking their way out of Africa at the time and reducing further, their inherently low genetic variety, compared to the populations they left behind.
 

In genetics, the haplogroup study is used to track and approximately date the genetic history of a population, its mixing with or separation from other populations,its migrations and the likes. The haplogroups living outside Africa are merely a subset of those existing in Africa. What is being looked for is the ‘original African gene type’.When numerically small groups have lived in isolation for long periods, physical types tend to standardize throughout a population.

 

The Andamanese are one of the few (and possibly the best) examples of such a situation. All lines of evidencesocial, cultural, historical, archaeological, linguistic, phenotypic, and genetic—support the conclusion that the Andaman Islanders have been isolated for a substantial period of time. Mitochondrial sequences were retrieved from museum specimens of the enigmatic Andaman islanders to analyse their evolutionary history. D-loop and protein-coding data reveal that phenotypic similarities with African pygmoid groups are covergent. The possibility of Adamanese still preserving the ‘original African code’cannot be negated. For centuries people have speculated over the origin of ‘human language’. The first scientific attempts were made at the end of the 18th century. Scholars began to compare groups of languages in detailed and systematic ways, to see whether there were correspondences between them. If these could be demonstrated, it could be assumed that the languages were related, in other words that they developed from a common source. In historical linguistics, the ‘comparative method’is a way of systematically comparing a series of languages in order to prove a historical relationship between them. Scholars began by identifying a set of formal similarities and differences between the languages and trying to painstakingly reconstruct the previous stages of development from which all forms could have been derived.

The view that all languages have diverged from a common source as a result of cultural evolution is known as ‘monogenesis’ in linguistic jargon. The existence of differences between languages is then explained as a consequence of people moving apart, in waves of migration around the world. Most of the world’s languages can be grouped into families but occasionally one encounters a language where resemblances to other languages are few or non existent. Andamanese is one such language (a very recent proposition). A developing hypothesis within the linguistic circles is that the ‘fossil island’ of Andaman [surviving the ‘Toba
volcanic eruption’] could be carrying the morphological [language specific] remains of the last "unchanged" survivors of the first migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa.The Andamanese languages might be the last representative of those languages whose origins date back to pre-neolithic times.

With the rapid technological developments in the study of the human genome, the entire living human (and extinct) populations can be analysed and compared , hence such "remnant populations" are of acute importance in tracing and dating the earliest migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens out of Africa.[though ancient human DNA studies are extremely problematic because of the extreme risk of contamination of samples and laboratories with modern human material] The Insular Andamanese Negritos are one of the most important subjects of this new science.
 

Andaman tribes remain a major scientific enigma and interacting with them is essential to understand the human jigsaw puzzle that is the story of the Great Human Migration out of Africa and the development of the modern human race. Linguistic and genetic research still seems to be in an early stage of infancy, but the collaboration would be immensly helpful to explore the mysteries of human origin, for after all, the absence of evidence certainly does not mean the evidence of absence.