Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 117
Rungus woman playing nose fl ute, northern Borneo.
It was not long before these diverse tribes began to war with each other,
as tribes still often do in New Guinea. And rapid exhaustion of the easiest
prey and pressure from population growth continued to push the migrants
into new lands. The vanguard of the Great Migration was likely to have been
a hesitant one, mostly made up of tribes that had been forced from their
lands when they faced food shortages or lost skirmishes with other groups.
We can now get some notion of how long it took for the Great Migra-
tion to happen. Using rapid DNA sequencing technology, it is now possible
to sequence complete mitochondrial chromosomes from the peoples scat-
tered along the Great Migration route, and to look for deep branches in the
resulting family trees. These exhaustive data were recently brought together,
