Karnataka - Mysore   

Need to preserve Onge, Great Andamanese tribes stressed

Special Correspondent

MYSORE: The Indian tribes of Onge and the Great Andamanese from Nicobar Islands can hold the key to understanding human evolution and hence need to be preserved, Lalji Singh, Director, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, has said.

He was delivering a lecture here on Monday on "Mystery of Our Origin" at a refresher course on phylogenetic biology organized by the Department of Zoology, Unit of Evolution and Genetics, University of Mysore.

To address the larger question of human origin and to unravel its mystery, the CCMB had analysed the complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) comprising 16,569 base pairs of five Onges, five Great Andamanese and five Nicobarese tribes, he said.

Scientists used the mtDNA sequence to trace the emigration of Andamanese and compared the complete mtDNA sequences of these tribes with other populations. It was found that the mtDNA of these two tribes did no match that of any of the populations in the world, including the 6,500 covering the Indian sub-continent.

"Therefore the Onge and the Great Andamanese are unique in their origin. Novel mutations found in the mtDNA of these tribes have helped us place them in two unique branches in the human evolutionary tree," Dr. Singh said.

The origin of Andaman "Negrito" and Nicobar "Mongoloid" populations had sparked speculations and their origins remained a mystery. Studies suggest the two ancient maternal lineages had evolved in the Andaman islands independently in genetic isolation and this might be owing to the initial penetration of the northern coastal areas of Indian Ocean by the modern humans during the "Out of Africa" migration about 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, he said.

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