Studies back up strange tale of tribe’s founding

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="4">Studies back up strange tale of tribe’s founding</font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font size="2" face="Arial" color="#00FF00">The Mlabri hunter-gatherers are said to have been founded by banished children who survived in the woods.</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">Posted March 3, 2005<br> Special to World Science</font> <b> <font size="2" face="Arial"><br> <br> Genetic and linguistic studies back up some key parts of an odd tale explaining the origins of a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe from Southeast Asia, researchers say. </font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" face="Arial">The studies, and the story, have another surprising implication, the researchers add: they show that farming peoples can sometimes revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This contradicts most traditional theories of cultural development, which assume the transition goes only the other way.<br> <br> The story concerns the Mlabri people, a group that lived as hunter-gatherers until recently. But the tale itself comes from a neighboring farming people, the Tin Prai. Their oral tradition claims the Mlabri originated several hundred years ago when two Tin Prai children were banished and sent downriver on a raft. They escaped into a forest, survived by foraging and spawned the Mlabri people, the only hunter-gatherer tribe in the area.<br> <br> The Mlabri today consist of around 300 people who range across parts of northern Thailand and western Laos, and are by many accounts a vulnerable people with threatened livelihoods. Having lost much of their original ranging land, and forbidden by their own customs to own farms, many of them now get by working for cheap wages on other people’s land.<br> <br> Their traditional lifestyle is to move frequently through the thick forests of the high mountains, rarely showing themselves to outsiders. They live in temporary structures of bamboo sticks thatched with banana leaves, which they leave after a week or two when the leaves turn yellow. This accounts for their traditional Thai name, Phi Tong Luang, or “spirit of the yellow leaves.”<br> <br> The new research seems to back up at least this much of the banishment-and-survival story told by the Tin Prai: the Mlabri in fact descend from a small handful of people that lived several hundred years ago. And these “founders” came from a neighboring farming community at least closely related to present-day Tin Prai.<br> <br> The Tin Prai’s tale “intriguingly parallels the genetic and linguistic evidence concerning the origins of the Mlabri,” write Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues, in a new study. A paper on the study is published in the Feb. 22 issue of the online journal <i>PLoS Biology</i>.<br> <br> Genetic tests suggest the Mlabri population descends from just one female and between one and four males, who lived between roughly 500 and 1,000 years ago, the researchers said.<br> <br> This conclusion stems from a finding that genetically, the Mlabri are nearly identical, indicating they must have come from a very limited gene pool. <br> <br> The researchers could separately estimate how many males and females originally contributed to that limited gene pool because, of the genes they studied, some are located on the Y chromosome, which is inherited from the father. Others are located on a type of DNA called mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through the mother.<br> <br> The length of the estimated 500-to-1,000 year time period was calculated based on the number of mutations that have accumulated in those genes, which tend to mutate at a known rate. The near-zero genetic variation in the Mlabri indicates very few mutations have accumulated, suggesting a recent evolutionary history.<br> <br> Linguistic evidence adds to the picture. Mlabri language is related to that of the neighboring Tin Prai. It could thus be have originated as an offshoot of ancestral forms of Tin Prai, the researchers surmise. <br> <br> The extent of the differences between the languages presumably depends on how long ago this branching off occurred. Based on this assumption, some researchers have estimated it occurred 600 years ago. This is also roughly comparable to the time estimate for Mlabri origins based on genetic evidence, Stoneking and colleagues noted, although Mlabri language seems to have also become mixed with some other, unknown tongue.<br> <br> One lesson of this research, Stoneking and colleagues wrote, is that “contemporary hunter-gatherer groups cannot be automatically assumed to represent the pre-agricultural lifestyle of human populations, descended unchanged from the Stone Age.”</font></b></p> </body>