ined for thousands of years owing to endogamy. We therefore predict that there will be an excess of recessive diseases in India, which should be possible to screen and map genetically.

Link
Bookmark and Share
Labels Admixture, Ancestry, Caste, Clusters, Genomics, India, Indo-European, South Asia
20 comments:

Ronojoy said...

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/india/Aryan-Dravidian-divide-a-myth-Study/articleshow/5053274.cms

``This paper rewrites history... there is no north-south divide,'' Lalji Singh, former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and a co-author of the study, said at a press conference here on Thursday.

Senior CCMB scientist Kumarasamy Thangarajan said there was no truth to the Aryan-Dravidian theory as they came hundreds or thousands of years after the ancestral north and south Indians had settled in India.


Sorry Dienekes, this comes straight from the horses mouth.
Friday, September 25, 2009 3:57:00 AM
argiedude said...

(i) the relationship between Andaman Islanders and ASI is not particularly close

Not particularly close?? Nigerians-ASI distance is 1772, and Andaman-ASI distance is 1199. The distance is particularly gargantuan. How strange, given that Sengupta found microsatellite diversity within Indians from every corner of the subcontinent to be less varied than in Europeans.

The authors further determine that CEU and ANI form a separate clade from the non-IE speaking Adygei from the Caucasus.

Adygei is unquestionably half-way between Europe and the HGDP Pakistani samples according to FST distances. This study seems to be coming up with lots of funny results that completely contradict previous studies.

.......................

The Rosenberg 2005 study that placed the 52 HGDP populations into 7 clusters found Europeans to belong almost 100% to the European cluster, Adygei split half and half between the European/Indian cluster (but mainly European), and all Pakistanis, from the south to the north, belonged overwhelmingly to the Indian cluster.

The Sengupta 2006 study tested Indians from every corner of the Indian sub-continent (except Andamans), and found their microsatellite diversity to be lesser than Europeans, which is already low enough. Not what you'd expect from a people derived from a mixture of practically 2 different continents.

The Aryan Invasion Theory requires us to believe that a bunch of nobodies riding on horsy genetically overwhelmed the gargantuan civilization of India. A modern equivalent would be the Amazon Indians overwhelming the 200 million people of Brazil.

http://www.worldmapper.org/images/largepng/7.png
Friday, September 25, 2009 4:57:00 AM
argiedude said...

Link corrected:

Population of the world 2000 years ago
Friday, September 25, 2009 5:02:00 AM
Dienekes said...

Senior CCMB scientist Kumarasamy Thangarajan said there was no truth to the Aryan-Dravidian theory as they came hundreds or thousands of years after the ancestral north and south Indians had settled in India.


Sorry Dienekes, this comes straight from the horses mouth.

I prefer to read what they wrote in the paper in Nature, rather than what they are attributed to have said in the Times of India:

"It is tempting to assume that the population ancestral to ANI and
CEU spoke ‘Proto-Indo-European’, which has been reconstructed as
ancestral to both Sanskrit and European languages38, although we
cannot be certain without a date for ANI–ASI mixture."

No evidence whatsoever in the paper that places the ANI-ASI admixture before the arrival of the Indo-Aryans to India.
Friday, September 25, 2009 11:35:00 AM
Ronojoy said...

The study analysed 500,000 genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups from 13 states. All the individuals were from six-language families and traditionally “upper” and “lower” castes and tribal groups. “The genetics proves that castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of the Indian society,” the study said. Thangarajan noted that it was impossible to distinguish between castes and tribes since their genetics proved they were not systematically different.

“The initial settlement took place 65,000 years ago in the Andamans and in ancient south India around the same time, which led to population growth in this part,” said Thangarajan. He added, “At a later stage, 40,000 years ago, the ancient north Indians emerged which in turn led to rise in numbers here. But at some point of time, the ancient north and the ancient south mixed, giving birth to a different set of population. And that is the population which exists now and there is a genetic relationship between the population within India.”
Friday, September 25, 2009 5:50:00 PM
Dienekes said...

Quoting the Times of India won't change anyone's mind. If the authors could date the time of the ANI-ASI admixture, or thought that ANI was unrelated to the Indo-European arrival in India, they wouldn't have written the exact opposite in the paper.
Friday, September 25, 2009 7:18:00 PM
eurologist said...

“The initial settlement took place 65,000 years ago in the Andamans and in ancient south India around the same time, which led to population growth in this part,” said Thangarajan. He added, “At a later stage, 40,000 years ago, the ancient north Indians emerged which in turn led to rise in numbers here.

Well, perhaps he said that because it is the only current model (I know of) that fits the geography and climate.

Western and much of northern India/Pakistan was a desert or at least very arid for a long time after initial settlement. Only in the mountainous north were water and lush river valleys with plenty of grazing animals available. 20K to 25K should be enough time to form distinct people - who lived in a much colder and much more seasonally varying climate.

If we make the assumption that most Europeans (outside of Semitic/ North African contributions) also derive from that population, we can see why it is so difficult to distinguish a clear signature of a more western IE genetic portion within India. And, their Figure 4 shows this relationship quite well.

I.e., there is no need for a later, overwhelming IE contribution to India.
Saturday, September 26, 2009 6:59:00 AM
terryt said...

"The initial settlement took place 65,000 years ago in the Andamans".

Have you got a reference for that? Last I heard was that the Andamans were settled relatively recently, around 35k. Of course that date is too recent for the Andamans to be at all relevant for the 'Great Southern Migration Theory' so the time may have been expanded to fit the theory regardless of the evidence.
Saturday, September 26, 2009 7:01:00 AM
terryt said...

The author seems to be relying on his own previous work:

http://www.ccmb.res.in/newccmb/andaman/mystery.html

which doesn't actually offer any evidence for the actual arrival in the Andamans. He just claims that date because it fits the theory. One of the authors at 'Gene Expression' reminds us that there are fundamentalists in India as well as in the West and in the Muslim world.
Saturday, September 26, 2009 7:29:00 AM
Dienekes said...

At a later stage, 40,000 years ago, the ancient north Indians emerged which in turn led to rise in numbers here

According to current estimates, modern Homo sapiens has been outside Asia for about 60,000 years, or, at any rate in the same order of magnitude as 40,000 years.

Thus, West and East Eurasians have accumulated genetic differences worth about 0.1 in terms of Fst in a few tens of thousands of years.

If ANI diverged from West Eurasians 40,000 years ago, which is similar to the West-East Eurasian split, then why are ANI 10 times closer to West Eurasians?

The obvious answer to this question is that ANI did not split from West Eurasians 40,000 years ago, but rather about 4,000 years ago, and represent Neolithic, Indo-Aryan, and later movements of Caucasoids from Central Asia and the Near East into Asia.
Saturday, September 26, 2009 1:35:00 PM
eurologist said...

ANI didn't diverge from West Eurasians 40K years ago - their predecessors initially were a source of them ~43K years ago. Then, for the unimaginably long period of 20,000 years, easy sustenance was available and the gene pool was larger in the vast plains and valleys between NW Pakistan/ Afghanistan and nowadays Ukraine, creating multiple migration events to both Europe and back to "India". That's why contact to "India" remained and ensured ANI/ West Eurasian continuity - broken with the onset of LGM.

So, the most remote "ANI" that we may be able to detect, genetically, are not 40K years old, but only 20K, diluted by multiple subsequent migrations from the west - of those, IE is only one, late, minor one.
Saturday, September 26, 2009 2:40:00 PM
Dienekes said...

IE is only one, late, minor one.

If IE was a late and minor migration, then how do you explain the sharp differences in genetic makeup that are both caste- and language- related. If the gene pool had already been established long before the advent of the Indo-Aryans, then why do ANI-ASI proportions vary so widely in India?

20K years is more than enough to homogenize any gene pool. Uyghurs were homogenized in less than 2K years, so how come Indian groups have anyting from 40 to 70% ANI ancestry, with individuals far exceeding that range?

The simple answer is that ANI was introduced to India fairly recently, and variation in ANI ancestry has been maintained because of (i) the caste system, (ii) the genetic differences between Indo-Aryans and native Indians, and (iii) the short period of time that has not allowed gene flow across caste lines to obliterate the differences.
Saturday, September 26, 2009 2:58:00 PM
Ponto said...

I like the study. At least it is presenting a hypothesis based on SNPs. The old Anthropologists always said that South Asians particularly the Northern ones were predominantly Caucasoid.

Indians seem to hate the Aryan invasion thing. I guess they think it a Eurocentric theory, and demeaning somehow. Europeans love the Paleolithic continuation of the population of Europe to modern times and hate the Neolithic farming demic movement, mainly as farming and civilisation originated among darkies from the Middle East region. Forget your prejudice, and go with what dna is telling us.

The Adygei are mainly a European people genetically with some South Asian admixture. They are not like most South Asians whose Caucasoid type SNPs can be located to that region. Europeans, Middle Easterners and South Asians while Caucasoid can be separated into their main regions by SNPs as can European ethnicities to their nations. The Adygei's SNPs are mostly in the "European" camp.

I think the Hawkes critique is reasonable but the study's showing South Asians to be more like European Caucasoids rather than any other group of people is undeniable whether the Caucasoid element dates from the mythohistorical Aryan Invasion or a much earlier time. One thing is certain, language and dna does connect most Europeans with most South Asians. It is interesting that nobody can decipher the symbolic language used by the Indus Valley people. Even the Semitic speaking peoples used the writing of the Sumerians and their language for many years after they conquered the Sumerians. Nothing like that happened in ancient India.
Saturday, September 26, 2009 3:33:00 PM
Maju said...

IDK but making some simple maths on what I could discern on the graph you posted (the figures are too small in many cases), I gather that the most likely scenario makes ANI being Neolithic immigrants.

I experimented with three models:

1. Making the ANI-CEU divergence being c. 50,000 years old (colonization of West Eurasia) would make the common Eurasian root way too old (c. 260,000 BP).

2. Making the ANI-CEU divergence being c. 8000 y.o. (Neolithic) makes the common Eurasian root at something older than 40,000 BP, which would be roughly coincident with the colonization of West Eurasia from India.

3. Making the ANI-CEU divergence being c. 4000 y.o. (Indoaryans) makes the common Eurasian root be only slightly older than 20,000 BP, what is too recent.

So guess that ANI can be identified with Neolithic colonists from West Asia and ASI with the pre-Neolithic native hunter-gathereres.
Sunday, September 27, 2009 8:27:00 AM
Thisis said...

The simple answer is that ANI was introduced to India fairly recently


Then how come even the tribals of Kerala (south-most part of India) have more than 40 % of ANI ancestry ?
Sunday, September 27, 2009 9:48:00 AM
Dienekes said...

which would be roughly coincident with the colonization of West Eurasia from India.

There was no "colonization of West Eurasia from India". What happened is roughly this: South and Southeast Asia were inhabited by the descendants of the Out of Africa migrants who stayed in the south. To this aboriginal population were added in the Neolithic and later Caucasoids in India and Mongoloids in Southeast Asia.

:: The simple answer is that ANI was introduced to India fairly recently


Then how come even the tribals of Kerala (south-most part of India) have more than 40 % of ANI ancestry ?

Most "Native" groups in the Americas have Caucasoid ancestry too. In India, the process of admixture has taken a much longer time, so, unlike the Americas were both pure Caucasoids and pure Natives still exist, in India the two elements have permeated all parts of society.
Sunday, September 27, 2009 10:33:00 AM
eurologist said...

There was no "colonization of West Eurasia from India"

Then where, if not from India, do the West Asians and Europeans come from? A second, later migration out of Africa? I don't think so. And, between about 70K and 45K, there was no straight way north that did not lead through hundreds of miles of desert.

Conversely, you have here DNA data that show Europeans to be close to Indians, and yet closer to a putative ancient subgroup. And, all the data that show many of the Y-DNA strains original to Europeans still reside in India.

The data don't fit a simplistic picture as Fig. 4, because there was 40,000 years of contact with West Asians, which in turn had contact with Europeans, and on top of that (but just on top) you have the IE migrations.
Sunday, September 27, 2009 11:02:00 AM
Dienekes said...

Then where, if not from India, do the West Asians and Europeans come from?

There is no reason to introduce a massive detour in the history of mankind, so that people go all the way to India and then all the way back to West Asia and Europe.
Sunday, September 27, 2009 11:07:00 AM
Maju said...

There was no "colonization of West Eurasia from India". What happened is roughly this: South and Southeast Asia were inhabited by the descendants of the Out of Africa migrants who stayed in the south. To this aboriginal population were added in the Neolithic and later Caucasoids in India and Mongoloids in Southeast Asia.

Dienekes, you surprise me a lot with that comment. All West Eurasian mtDNA (excepted a couple of minor clades like X) and Y-DNA (only E1b1b1 is exceptional in this) is much more diverse in South Asia than the West. It's fairly clear that West Eurasians are derived from the older and more diverse South Asian population, surely at a time after South and East Asians were already differentiated. I think this is almost beyond any doubt.

Reviewing by clade:

MtDNA: R is clearly of South Asian origin, N1'5 and N2 (including W) are shared between South and West Asia. Only X would seem anomalous of all Western lineages in this.

Y-DNA: all non-E1b1b1 is F, which is clearly more diverse in South Asia than anywhere else.

Additionally several technologies later used in the west, like bladelets and eventually microliths too are apparently South Asian creations and have there an older age than anywhere else.

But if you think otherwise, you'd still have to think that the ANI/ASI divide is about as old as post OOA Eurasian expansion, what should make things practically the same.

You could maybe argue that the ANI/ASI divide relates with the expansion of microlithism worldwide and that this would be a more recent phenomenon allowing for the return of ANI to be Indoaryan. But this would pose many challenges in the West, as well as demanding an explanation for what happened with the Neolithic colonists, now suddenly vanished from the genetic landscape of India.

A good idea would be to compare with an outgroup like East Asians. That would give us a better perspective but I feel quite sure that East Asians would diverge from above the ANI/ASI split.
Sunday, September 27, 2009 12:09:00 PM
Maju said...

Re. Kerala: the castes of Kerala (or anywhere nearby) are not Aryan either. There is no source from which to draw such ANI penetration. Dravidians and Aryans are partly ANI and we know that, excepting the very tiny minority that are Brahmins, there were never any Aryans in south India. Instead Neolithic could explain this flow (and its importance) very well.

There is no reason to introduce a massive detour in the history of mankind, so that people go all the way to India and then all the way back to West Asia and Europe.

There are plenty of reasons: (1) genetic, (2) archaeological and (3) some extremely strong guys known as Neanderthals.