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Studies back up strange tale
of tribe’s founding
The Mlabri
hunter-gatherers are said to have been founded by banished children who
survived in the woods.
Posted March 4, 2005
Special to World Science
The Tin Prai people of Thailand have handed down a strange story over
generations. Several hundred years ago, they say, they banished two children
from their farming community, and sent them downriver on a raft. The children
escaped into the deep jungles, survived by foraging and founded a new tribe: the
secretive Mlabri, the region’s only hunter-gatherer people.
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The Mlabri (reprinted from the New
Courier/UNESCO.)
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Some Mlabri children today receive an
education in local schools. (Photo courtesy Refugees International.)
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New genetic and linguistic studies back up some key
elements of
this tale, researchers say.
The findings have another surprising implication, they add: they show that
agricultural peoples can revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This contradicts traditional theories of cultural development, which
mostly assume the transition goes only the other way.
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
lifestyle and language. They have lost much of their original ranging land to
logging and encroaching farms. Forbidden by their own customs to own land, many of them now get by working for
low wages on others’ farms.
Their traditional lifestyle is to move frequently through mountain jungles, rarely showing themselves to outsiders. They
make temporary homes of bamboo sticks and 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.”
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
who lived several hundred years ago. And these “founders” came from a neighboring farming community at least closely related to present-day Tin Prai.
The Tin Prai’s tale “intriguingly parallels the genetic and linguistic evidence,” 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
March issue of the online journal
PLoS Biology.
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.
This conclusion stems from a finding that genetically, the Mlabri are nearly identical, indicating they must have come from a very limited gene pool.
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.
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.
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.
The extent of the differences between the languages presumably depends on how long ago
the branching-off occurred. Based on this assumption, some researchers have estimated
it happened 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.
Stoneking and colleagues
cited the linguist Jørgen Rischel of the Academia Europaea as the source of
their information on the banisment story.
“I heard the story everal years ago in a Tin Prai village in the mountains in Northern Thailand,” Rischel
wrote in a recent email, “and I have a recording of it in the Tin language. Its existence was reconfirmed recently by the Rev. David Jordan, a missionary to the Tin Prai.
“Details are unclear,” he continued, “but the basics of the story [are] that two Tin children were set afloat as a sacrifice (one source says that their presence was considered to give bad luck). They were of different sexes.
“According to the story they survived and escaped into the forest,” he
added, “becoming the founders of the Mlabri tribe. Reportedly their young age when they left the village explains ‘why the Mlabri are so childish’ or, according to another version, ‘why they speak so slowly.’”
Before the new findings,
many researchers believed the Mlabri were remnants of an ancient
hunting-gathering culture of southeast Asia that predated farming, called the
Hoabinhian culture.
This assumption would fit in
with the usual typical pattern in the development of human cultures. In the
usual progression, hunting-gathering predates farming, not the other way
around.
Stoneking and colleagues
pointed out that researchers can no longer consider this to be always true. “Contemporary hunter-gatherer groups cannot be automatically assumed to represent the pre-agricultural lifestyle of human populations, descended unchanged from the Stone Age.”
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