page_title: Andamanese
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Andamanese / History / Origins
context_page_description: The Andamanese are the various indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia. The Andamanese peoples are among the various groups considered Negrito, owing to their dark skin and diminutive stature. All Andamanese traditionally lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and appear to have lived in substantial isolation for thousands of years. It is suggested that the Andamanese settled in the Andaman Islands around the latest glacial maximum, around 26,000 years ago.
  The Andamanese peoples included the Great Andamanese and Jarawas of the Great Andaman archipelago, the Jangil of Rutland Island, the Onge of Little Andaman, and the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island. At the end of the 18th century, when they first came into sustained contact with outsiders, an estimated 7,000 Andamanese remained. In the next century, they were largely wiped out by diseases, violence, and loss of territory. Today, only roughly 400–450 Andamanese remain, with the Jangil being extinct.
context_section_description: According to Chaubey and Endicott (2013), the Andaman Islands were settled less than 26,000 years ago, by people who were not direct descendants of the first migrants out of Africa. According to Wang et al. (2011),
  ...the Andaman archipelago was likely settled by modern humans from northeast India via the land-bridge which connected the Andaman archipelago and Myanmar around the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a scenario in well agreement with the evidence from linguistic and palaeoclimate studies.
  It was previously assumed that the Andaman ancestors were part of the initial Great Coastal Migration that was the first expansion of humanity out of Africa, via the Arabian peninsula, along the coastal regions of the Indian mainland and toward Southeast Asia, China, and Oceania. The Andamanese were considered to be a pristine example of a hypothesized Negrito population, which showed similar physical characteristics, and was supposed to have existed throughout southeast Asia. The existence of a specific Negrito-population is nowadays doubted. Their commonalities could be the result of evolutionary convergence and/or a shared history.
  Bulbeck (2013) shows the Andamanese maternal mtDNA is entirely mitochondrial Haplogroup M. Their Y-DNA belong to the D haplogroup which has not been seen outside of the Andamans, a fact that underscores the insularity of these tribes. Analysis of mtDNA, which is inherited exclusively by maternal descent, confirms the above results. All Onge belong to mtDNA haplogroup M, which is unique to Onge people. This haplogroup, which is descended from Africa, represents the entire lineage of the Onge and Adamanese, and is the predominant mtDNA among the Semang in Malaysia. Moreover, haplogroup M is the single most common mtDNA haplogroup in Asia, where it represents 60% of all maternal lineages.
  A 2017 study by Mondal et al. finds that the Riang lineage of D1a3 (a Tibeto-Burmese population) and the Andamanese D1a3 have their nearest related lineages in East Asia. The Jarawa and Onge shared this D1a3 lineage with each other within the last ~7000 years, but had diverged from the Japanese D1a2 lineage ~53000 years ago". They further suggest that: “This strongly suggests that haplogroup D does not indicate a separate ancestry for Andamanese populations. Rather, haplogroup D was part of the standing variation carried by the OOA expansion, and later lost from most of the populations except in Andaman and partially in Japan and Tibet”.
caption: Map of human haplotype migration based on mitochondrial DNA, with Key (coloured) indicating periods in numbered thousands of years before the present. Note the route of the mtDNA haplogroup M through the Indian mainland and the Andaman Islands, possibly on to Southeast Asia
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