The next morning, when Virumandi, who is now 30 years old and works in a BPO, came back home, he was informed that a senior professor from the university had come looking for him.
"I didn't know what to do. I was working as a network engineer in the university at that time. I knew Professor Pitchappan as I had done some work in his lab," Virumandi said, adding that his first thought was that he had goofed up on the job.
"I called my boss and told him professor Pitchappan had come calling," Virumandi recalled. His boss asked him to go meet the professor immediately and get back to him if there was a problem.
"I rushed to the lab and found that the professor was not in town. But his people told me that there was nothing wrong. He had come to my house about some research and a sample that I had given years ago," Virumandi said.
Then, he says, he remembered the tests conducted in 1996. "I remembered that some people had come to my college to collect samples. Most of my friends declined to comply and I was among the few people who volunteered," he said.
Once he came back from Delhi, Pitchappan sat down with Virumandi and explained the details of what the results meant.
"I told him he had a marker in his body that is present in the descendents of the early man from Africa. He was worried initially. Then I had to convince him that it did not mean that something was wrong with him," he said.
Then, Pitchappan sent one of his students to trace out the lineage of all the M130 people in Jothimanickam, Virumandi's village.
"When we tested the 13 people, we found that they were all from one pedigree. We call this the founder effect," Pitchappan said, explaining how scientists are so sure about the villagers being direct descendents of the early man.
What clinched it for the researchers was the fact that Virumandi's lineage can be traced back to nine generations, while the others stopped at three or four.
"What this meant was that Virumandi's family is the one that goes back the farthest. That means they were indeed the first Indians, and the rest of his extended family are descendents of the early migrants and the later migrants who disturbed the early population," said Pitchappan, who says he is sure there can't be any such descendents in other parts of India.
Image: Virumandi with his cousin, who is among the 12 others who carry the M130 gene marker in Tamil Nadu's Jothimanickam village.
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