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*

1Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad-500 007, India 2Estonian 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.