Studying the genetic history of the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia can provide crucial clues to the peopling of Southeast Asia as a whole. We have analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNAs) control-region and coding-region markers in 447 mtDNAs from the region, including 260 Orang Asli, representative of each of the traditional groupings, the Semang, the Senoi, and the Aboriginal Malays, allowing us to test hypotheses about their origins. All of the Orang Asli groups have undergone high levels of genetic drift, but phylogeographic traces nevertheless remain of the ancestry of their maternal lineages. The Semang have a deep ancestry within the Malay Peninsula, dating to the initial settlement from Africa >50,000 years ago. The Senoi appear to be a composite group, with approximately half of the maternal lineages tracing back to the ancestors of the Semang and about half to Indochina. This is in agreement with the suggestion that they represent the descendants of early Austroasiatic speaking agriculturalists, who brought both their language and their technology to the southern part of the peninsula approximately 4,000 years ago and coalesced with the indigenous population. The Aboriginal Malays are more diverse, and although they show some connections with island Southeast Asia, as expected, they also harbor haplogroups that are either novel or rare elsewhere. Contrary to expectations, complete mtDNA genome sequences from one of these, R9b, suggest an ancestry in Indochina around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, followed by an early-Holocene dispersal through the Malay Peninsula into island Southeast Asia.

Phylogeography and ethnogenesis of aboriginal Southeast Asians.

In the first millennium A.D. mainland Southeast Asia's first great states arise, but then in the span of a few centuries these Indianized realms collapse and their Pyu, Mon, Khmer, and Cham peoples decline. In their place Burmese, Tai, and Vietnamese states arise and go on to rule the mainland as their peoples come to dominate the second millennium. Case by case these shifts appear to be ethnic and political successions wherein the strong displace the weak, but seen together regionally the similarities suggest an agricultural change whereby an irrigated wet rice specialization from upland valleys displaced gardening and farming complexes native to the lowlands.

Agricultural Change and Ethnic Succession in Southeast Asian States: A Case for Regional Anthropology

History was the key to identity for the pioneers of Filipino nationhood in the late nineteenth century. John Schumacher has recounted the struggle by which the youthful Europeanized originators of Filipino nationhood—the ilustrados, literally “enlightened”—reacted to the “chauvinism common to members of governing races” (1973, 191–220). Amid the onslaught of Spanish colonial racism, these educated youths

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S002191180500152X

Tracing origins : Ilustrado nationalism and the racial science of migration waves

This paper examines the major trends since the 1950s in social science writing on forest management in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is simultaneously rich in and dependent on natural resources, both for local and national use or sale. Among renewable resources, forest products have played critical roles in the region's national, provincial, and local economies before, during, and after colonialism — for as long as two millennia. Their importance in international trade illustrates that Southeast Asia's forests linked the region to other parts of the world for quite some time, dispelling myths that parts of the region such as Borneo were “remote”, “primitive”, or “pristine”.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022463400010584

Social Aspects of Forestry in Southeast Asia: A Review of Postwar Trends in the Scholarly Literature

There is a longstanding history in South Asia of relations of exchange and interdependence between agriculturalists and peoples involved in the hunting of wild animals and the gathering of wild plants. These relationships, far from being an historically fixed and immutable, were instead marked by a high degree of variability and flexibility with specific groups of people altering their strategies in relation to ecological, demographic, and political imperatives. These points are not controversial—many scholars have described such relationships and have contributed significantly to our understanding of the tremendous diversity of South Asian prehistoric and historic subsistence strategies. I would like to build from this literature in two ways. First of all, I would suggest that the strategies of contemporary forager-trader groups in South Asia are best viewed as the outcome of historically contingent processes, not merely as cultural-evolutionary throwbacks. Second, and more specifically, I will be concerned here to trace some of the changes and possible changes in the organization of foraging/trading groups in southwestern India coincident with the expansion of the coastal spice trade and the increasing integration of this region into a 1

Forager-Traders in South and Southeast Asia: Pepper in the hills: upland–lowland exchange and the intensification of the spice trade

The authors consider the ways in which the high degree of ethnic diversity within the region is related to the nature of tropical Asian environments, on the one hand, and the nature of Southeast Asian political systems and the ways in which they manipulate natural resources, on the other. Rather than focus on defining the phenomenon of ethnicity, this book examines the different social evolutionary contexts in which the phenomenon is manifested. Companion volume to Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia (Michigan Papers no. 27)

Karl L. Hutterrer

Papers

Ethnic Diversity and the Control of Natural Resources in Southeast Asia