It seems fitting that we start our inquiry into the relationships between Indic, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian language-speaking peoples in Monsoon Asia by trying to reconstruct the situation around 1500 BC, before Indian thought took solid form in the Vedas and Austronesianspeakers dominated the islands. We know that there were people in the islands for thousands of years before that, early forms of Homo erectus and now-extinct variants of Homo sapiens like the Hobbits of Flores or the Denisovans who left traces of their genetic material in the outer islands. At a guess, these people tended to be short and dark, like Munda of Chota Nagpur, some inhabitants of the Mentawai islands, or Semang of interior central West Malaysia.

Little trace of their original languages remains (Blust 2013). “It seems reasonably safe to assume that Andamanese is the sole remaining linguistic representative of pre-Neolithic Southeast Asia, its roots perhaps going back as far as the initial colonization of Southeast Asia by modern humans—an isolate that has remained largely unaffected by the vast linguistic spreads that have occurred elsewhere in Southeast Asia in Neolithic and post-Neolithic times” (Burenhult 1996, p. 14), though northern Andamanese may have Austroasiatic affinities (Blevins in Blust 2013, p. xx, fn. 7). The other linguistic isolate is Shompen, traditionally spoken by foragers among the Austroasiatic-speaking Nicobarese (Blench 2010). Blust (2013) suggests that these people may have migrated to Indonesia not through Malaysia but by sea, from Burma.