The distributions of different Andamanese peoples, languages, and dialects at the time of British contact compared to the present-day.
In the 18th century the Onge were distributed acrossLittle Andaman Island and the nearby islands, with some territory and camps established onRutland Island and the southern tip ofSouth Andaman Island. After they encountered British colonial officers, friendly relations were established with theBritish Empire in the 1800s through LieutenantArchibald Blair. British naval officerM. V. Portman described them as the "mildest, most timid, and inoffensive" group of Andamanese people he had encountered.[3][4] By the end of the 19th century they sometimes visited theSouth andNorth Brother Islands to catchsea turtles; at the time, those islands seemed to be the boundary between their territory and the range of theGreat Andamanese people further north.[4] Today, the surviving members are confined to two reserve camps on Little Andaman: Dugong Creek in the northeast, and South Bay.
Onge population numbers were substantially reduced in the aftermath of colonisation and settlement, from 672 in 1901 to barely 100.[5]: 51 [6] The population is still maintaining their cultural and biological identity, and it appears that total numbers have increased from 100 to 117 in 2017.[7]
A major cause of the decline in Onge population is the changes in their food habits brought about by their contact with the outside world.[8] Infant and child mortality is in the range of 40%.[9] The Onge'snet reproductive index is 0.91.[10] The net reproductive index among the Great Andamanese is 1.40.[11]
Onge people depicted in Kolkata Museum
In 1901, there were 672 Onge; 631 in 1911, 346 in 1921, 250 in 1931, and 150 in 1951.[12][13]
The semi-nomadic Onge have traditional stories that tell of the ground shaking and a great wall of water destroying the land. Taking heed of this story, the Onge survived thetsunami catastrophe caused by the2004 Indian Ocean earthquake by taking shelter in the highlands.[14]
In December 2008, eight male tribal members died after drinking a toxic liquid – identified asmethanol by some sources – that they had apparently mistaken fordrinking alcohol.[15] The liquid apparently came from a container that had washed ashore at Dugong Creek near their settlement on the island, but Port Blair authorities ordered an investigation into whether it had originated elsewhere. A further 15 Onge were taken to hospital with at least one critically ill.[16]
With their population estimated at only around 100 before the incident, the director ofSurvival International described the mass poisoning as a "calamity for the Onge", and warned that any more deaths could "put the survival of the entire tribe in serious danger".[16]Bhopinder Singh, theLieutenant Governor of the Andaman Islands, ordered an inquiry into the incident.[17] The Onge have been rather vulnerable toward any option for radical change, they deserve close, careful attention to ward off any untoward impact of change-initiatives.[18]
The native Andamanese religion and belief system is a form ofanimism.Ancestor worship is an important element in the religious traditions of the Andaman islands.[19] The Andamanese probably had no government or clan leader, but made decisions by groupconsensus.[20]
The Onge speak theÖnge language. It is one of two knownOngan languages (southernAndamanese languages). Önge used to be spoken throughout Little Andaman as well as in smaller islands to the north, and possibly in the southern tip ofSouth Andaman island. Since the middle of the 19th century, with the arrival of the British in theAndamans, and, afterIndian independence, the massive inflow of Indian settlers from the mainland, the number of Onge speakers has steadily declined. However, a moderate increase has been observed in recent years.[21] As of 2006[update], there were 94 native Onge speakers[22] confined to a single settlement in the northeast of Little Andaman Island (see map above), making it anendangered language.
TheOngan languages, to which Onge belongs, have been proposed byJuliette Blevins to be related toMainland Asian languages, such asAustronesian.[23] However, this proposal has not been well received by other linguists, such asRobert Blust, who concludes that the hypothesis is not supported by thecomparative method (used in linguistics), and also cites non-linguistic (such as cultural, archaeological, and biological) evidence against Blevins' hypothesis.[24]George van Driem (2011) considers Blevins' evidence as "not compelling", although he leaves the possibility open that some resemblances could be the result of contact/borrowing, a position also held by Hoogervorst (2012).[25][26]
PCA calculated on present-day and ancient individuals from eastern Eurasia and Oceania. PC1 (23,8%) distinguish East-Eurasians and Australo-Melanesians, while PC2 (6,3%) differentiates East-Eurasians along a North to South cline.Genetic population tree of "eastern non-African" populations.
Genetically, the Onge, as well as other Andamanese people, are distantly related toEast Asian people. The Andamanese Onge show the highest affinity towards some Southeast AsianNegrito ethnic groups, such as theAeta people, but also ancient remains ofHoabinhians, which are all characterized by Basal-East Asian ancestry. It was found that Andamanese (Onge) split from the common ancestor of modern day East Asians between 50,000 BC and 25,000 BC, before becoming isolated on theAndaman Islands. The Andamanese (Onge) as well as East Asians, are also distantly related to Ancient Ancestral South Indians, a proposed ancient indigenous lineage ofSouth Asia. Recent genetic evidence suggest that a Basal-East Asian population (close or ancestral to Andamanese and East Asians) was widespread inAsia and contributed to the formation of modernSouth Asians.[27][28][29][30][31][32] Onge are also closely related toPapuans andAboriginal Australians although they lack the additional Denisovan ancestry found in the latter two,[33] however, other studies detected Denisovan and Neanderthal affinities.[34][35] Overall, despite their affinities, there was a simultaneous split between the Onge, Asian (including Han, Indigenous Taiwanese and Thai) and Near Oceanian (including Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians) lineages after the initial eastward migration of anancient eastern lineage from theIranian Plateau.[36][37]
Genetic population tree of Eurasian populations.
A study by Reich et al. (2009) found that while the Onge are distantly related to modern South Asians, they have none of the admixture fromNeolithic Iranian farmers orsteppe pastoralists which is widespread on the mainland. From this, they conclude that the Onge are solely descended from one of the ancient populations which contributed to the genetics of modern Indians.[38] According to Chaubey and Endicott (2013), overall, the Andamanese are more closely related to Southeast Asians and East Asians than they are to present-day South Asians.[39] According to Yelmen et al. 2019, the non-West Eurasian part extracted from South Asian samples, especially from certain South Indian tribal groups, are a better proxy for Ancient Ancestral South Asian (AASI) ancestry than the Andamanese Onge are.[40] There is also evidence of deep divergence between the AASI lineage and the ancestry found in present Onge.[33][41] According to a 2023 study,Great Andamanese are found to be ancestral to the Onge andJarawa groups.[42]
The Onge's physical similarities with indigenousAfrican groups are also reflective of adaptation to tropical rainforests andconvergent evolution rather than shared ancestry.[42]
The Onge population is consistently declining and infant mortality rate is very high. Several physiological parameters such as ABO, Rh blood group, blood pressure, SGOT, SGPT and total protein level, Hepatitis B surface antigen, VDRL and some genetic markers have been conducted.[43] The results of blood pressure, cholesterol level and liver enzyme test do not show any abnormality. However, the incidence of HbsAg is found to be very high that might have affected their fertility.[43][44]
Analysis of paternal lineages indicates that all Onge carry the Y-DNAHaplogroup D, widespread inEast Asia and less inCentral Asia.[45] Maternally, the Onge also exclusively belong to theM clade, bearing the M2 and M4 subclades, commonly found in Asia.[46][38][47]
The immunoglobulin levels (G,M and A) have been studied and found to be quite high compare to other Indian and world populations. The increase level of immunoglobulins in the Onge might have resulted to frequent exposure to different kind of infections and diseases.[48]
^Weber, George."Maurice Vidal Portman (1861–1935)".The Andamanese (Appendix A – Pioneer Biographies of the British Period to 1947). Archived fromthe original on 5 August 2012. Retrieved3 July 2012.
^Pandya, Vishvajit (1993).Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese Ethnoanemology, Cosmology, and the Power of Ritual. Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-562971-2.
^"अंडमान में जनजातियों को ख़तरा" [Tribes endangered in the Andamans].BBC News (in Hindi). 30 December 2004. Retrieved25 November 2008.जारवा के 100, ओन्गी के 105, ग्रेट एंडमानिस के 40–45 और सेन्टेलीज़ के क़रीब 250 लोग नेगरीटो कबीले से हैं, जो दक्षिण एशिया की प्राचीनतम जनजाति है [100 of the Jarawa, 105 of the Onge, 40–45 of the Great Andamanese, and about 250 of the Sentinelese belong to the Negrito group which is South Asia's oldest tribal affiliation].
^Devi, L. Dilly (1987). "Sociological Aspects of Food and Nutrition among the Onges of the Little Andaman Island". Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delhi, Delhi
^"Journal of Social Research".Journal of Social Research.19. Council of Social and Cultural Research, Ranchi University Department of Anthropology, Bihar. 1976. Retrieved25 November 2008.
^Lewis, M. Paul; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2013)."Öñge".Ethnologue: Languages of the World (17th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.Archived from the original on 9 March 2016.
^Blevins, Juliette (2007), "A Long Lost Sister of Proto-Austronesian? Proto-Ongan, Mother of Jarawa and Onge of the Andaman Islands" (PDF),Oceanic Linguistics,46 (1): 154–198,doi:10.1353/ol.2007.0015,S2CID 143141296
^van Driem, George (2011)."Rice and the Austroasiatic and Hmong-Mien homelands". In N.J Enfield (ed.).Dynamics of human diversity: the case of mainland Southeast Asia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Retrieved13 November 2021.
^Wang, Tianyi; Yang, Melinda A.; Zhu, Zhonghua; Ma, Minmin; Shi, Han; Speidel, Leo; Min, Rui; Yuan, Haibing; Jiang, Zhilong; Hu, Changcheng; Li, Xiaorui; Zhao, Dongyue; Bai, Fan; Cao, Peng; Liu, Feng (29 May 2025)."Prehistoric genomes from Yunnan reveal ancestry related to Tibetans and Austroasiatic speakers".Science.388 (6750) eadq9792.doi:10.1126/science.adq9792.The present-day Onge and ancient Hòabìnhian individual (La368) share a close genetic relationship to each other, carrying a deeply diverged Basal Asian ancestry as genetically distant from populations carrying Tianyuan ancestry as those carrying East Asian ancestry.
^M. Phillip Endicott; Thomas P. Gilbert; Chris Stringer; Carles Lalueza-Fox; Eske Willerslev; Anders J. Hansen; Alan Cooper (2003)."The Genetic Origins of the Andaman Islanders"(PDF).American Journal of Human Genetics.72 (1):178–184.doi:10.1086/345487.PMC378623.PMID12478481.Archived(PDF) from the original on 7 March 2019. Retrieved8 July 2021.The HVR‑1 data separate them into two lineages, identified on the Indian mainland ... as M4 and M2 ... The Andamanese M2 contains two haplotypes ... developed in situ, after an early colonization ... Alternatively, it is possible that the haplotypes have become extinct in India or are present at a low frequency and have not yet been sampled, but, in each case, an early settlement of the Andaman Islands by an M2‑bearing population is implied ... The Andaman M4 haplotype ... is still present among populations in India, suggesting it was subject to the late Pleistocene population expansions....
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