Supporting Online Material
Reconstructing the origin of Andaman Islanders
Kumarasamy Thangaraj,1 Gyaneshwer Chaubey,1 Toomas Kivisild,2 Alla G. Reddy,1
Vijay Kumar Singh,1 Avinash A. Rasalkar1, Lalji Singh1*
1
2
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad-500 007, India
Estonian Biocenter, Riia 23, Tartu- 51010, Estonia
Geographical, historical, cultural and anthropological perspectives on the Andaman
and Nicobar Islands
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located Southeast of the Indian subcontinent, form
part of a range of submarine mountains, 1130 Km long, running from Cape Negrais in the
Arakan Yoma range of Burma to Achin Head in Sumatra. This range separates the Bay of
Bengal from the Andaman Sea. The older rocks are early tertiary or late cretaceous. The
newer rocks in Sentinel Islands contain fossils of radiolarians and foraminifers with the
superstructure of corals. The Andaman Islands may have been linked to Myanmar by a
land bridge during the ice age.
The Negritos of the Andaman Group of Islands belong to thirteen different tribes
speaking different languages. Both culturally and linguistically, they have been divided
into two groups; the Great Andaman and Little Andaman (1S). Ten tribes - Cari, Kora,
Bo, Jeru, Kede, Kol, Juwoi, Pucikwar, Bale and Ben - belong to the Great Andaman
group. Three tribes - Jarawa, Onge and Sentinelese - belong to Little Andaman group.
The linguistic distance between the two groups is so great that the linguistic affinity
cannot be identified by comparing words (1S). The present population of 20 people under
the name Great Andamanese claims Bo and Jeru descendancy. Their present language is
a Creole formed from the mixing of different languages spoken earlier. Their languages
belong to an isolated language family viz, the Andamanese language family (2S).
Materials and methods
Sample collection and DNA extraction have been described in Thangaraj et al. (3S).
Based on HVS-I (hypervariable sequence I) information (3S), five Onges, five Greater
Andamanese and five Nicobarese were selected and their mtDNA was sequenced using
twenty-four pairs of primers published elsewhere (4S). To avoid the five major types of
errors (phantom mutation, base shift, reference bias, base mis-scoring and artificial
recombination) reported by Bandelt et al. (5S), each mtDNA sample was resequenced
twice blindly, by two individuals independently, using both forward and reverse primers.
All differences from the reference sequence (6S) were confirmed by manual rechecking
of the sequence electropherogram. All sequences have been deposited in the NCBI
database (Accession Numbers: AY950286 to AY950300). Time estimates were
calculated using the mutation rate of 1.26 x 10-8 given by Mishmar et al. (7S), which
were 5139 years per one mutation between 577 and 16023 positions of the CRS (6S). The
standard deviation (SD) was calculated using the method proposed by Saillard et al. (8S).
Information regarding other haplogroups was obtained elsewhere (9S-17S).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Chris Tyler-Smith and P. M. Bhargava for their valuable comments in the
preparation of this manuscript. We thank all the students and staff of various Colleges
and Universities, who actively participated in this study by collecting samples from
different ethnic groups of India. We are also grateful to four reviewers of this manuscript.
Figure legends:
Figure 1S. Maximum Parsimony Phylogenetic tree constructed from complete mtDNA
sequences of the Andaman and Nicobar Islanders. O, GA and N represents Onges, Great
Andamanese and Nicobarese, respectively. Information regarding other haplogroups has
been obtained from elsewhere (9S-17S). Recurrent mutations are underlined.