jb+Day+17

After about a week of dodging poisonous snakes and spiders I said goodbye to the Aborigines, kangaroos, koalas, and dingos. I drove the rental car back to Melborne Airport. I ate a little food at the in-airport McDonald's and headed toward my gate. It was June 22 and I had booked a ticket to Madurai, India. It cost me $1128. My goal was to head off to an isolated village west of Madurai. Spencer Wells postulated that early humans traveled through India to get to Australia, so that is where I was going. Perhaps some families of people had stayed in India rather than journey accross what is now a watery path.

At the airport I again rented a car from the nearby rental for around $130. I again headed out of town towards the wilderness. All of the groups of people that I am going to see are fairly isolated from the rest of society. This allows them to keep their way of life and keeps their genetic pool fairly restricted. Mating with a smaller population allows for less changes to occur in the population's DNA. This then allows the genetic markers to be more easily seen. The people that we are looking for probably come from haplogroup M.

The people here in India are definitely more industrialized and are a more advanced civilization than the rest of the tribes I have visited so far. They are a farming society rather than a hunter-gatherer one. The village I visited was a bit to the west of the booming city of Madurai, a very old city in southeast India.