The Orang Asli descend from several migrations spanning 60,000 years
The oldest inhabitants of Peninsular Malaysia are not one people but many. The Orang Asli, just 0.7 per cent of the peninsula's population in 2017, include descendants of the first modern humans to arrive 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, later Austroasiatic newcomers, and seafaring Austronesians whose ancestors ultimately came from Taiwan.
Genetics and language map the layers. The Semang, living mainly in the north, belong to that earliest migration and share ancestry with the Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers who occupied the region in the late Pleistocene; some of their burials date back 10,000 years. The Senoi, the largest group at about 54 per cent of Orang Asli, arrived between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago as part of an Austroasiatic population, and both groups speak Aslian languages related to Mon-Khmer. Their very name comes from words meaning people in the Semai and Temiar languages. The Proto-Malays, around 43 per cent, speak Austronesian languages and arrived between 2000 and 1500 BCE.
The three-part scheme of Semang, Senoi and Proto-Malay is a colonial invention built on appearance, language, lifestyle and location, and it claims no scientific precision. Boundaries blur, groups intermarried, and the Proto-Malays were once counted as ethnic Malays before British authorities reclassified them because their way of life resembled that of their neighbours. Communities rarely describe themselves with these labels, preferring local names, often simply a word for human being.
Naming has been contested for centuries. Early records mention orang benua, people of the soil. Northerners were called Sakai and southerners Jakun, and Sakai and the English term aborigines came to carry insulting overtones of backwardness. During the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s, communist rebels courting indigenous support called them Orang Asal, native people, and the official term Orang Asli came into use in the early 1960s.
Ways of life vary widely. Senoi communities once supplied forest produce to Malay and Siamese states and now largely farm rubber, oil palm or cocoa. Among Proto-Malays, the Temuan have long farmed, while the Orang Kuala and Orang Seletar live by the sea and fish. Most Proto-Malay groups are not Muslim, though the Orang Kuala converted before Malaysian independence. Each group guards its own language, customs and ancestral land.
Source: Orang Asli
