In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.The three teams are led by Eske Willersley of the University of Copenhagen (A genomic history of aboriginal Australia), David Reich of Harvard University (The Simons Genetic Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations), and Mait Metspalu of the Estonian Biocentre (Genomic analyses inform on migration events during the peopling of Eurasia).
Unfortunately all the articles are behind a paywall, and a visit to the nearby university library is not in the plan for now. The article with the most to do about anything Indian is the Reich article.
Some observations follow.
About the dates:
There were tool-making hominids in India at the time of the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago. Was India repeopled by this "single population" mentioned above; or had this population already arrived in India at that time?
Figure 1 from the Reich article:
It looks like this:
The neighbor-joining algorithm is described in this wiki article. Given a set of N points with the distances between every pair of points, the neighbor-joining algorithm joins the two closest points into a new point, computes an effective distance of this new point from the other points, and then runs the neighbor-joining algorithm on the N-1 points (1 new point and N-2 untouched points). It runs until all the points are joined. Wiki tells us that this algorithm gives a good approximation to an optimized 'balanced minimized evolution' tree (whatever that means).
PS: How do two population groups get to be closely related? One is that they intermarry; the other is that though endogamous they share recent common ancestors.
With this under our belt, let's look at some of the diagram, showing the Indian sub-populations:
Remember how to read this. Neighbor-joining found Mala and Relli to be the most closely related of all these groups. In the subsequent graph, the Madiga- (Mala-Relli) relationship was the closest. Irula-Kappu is next. and the next is the (Irula-Kappu)-(Madiga-(Mala-Relli)). And so on.
No big surprises here. We kind of see the ASI/ANI gradient reflected here. ASI=Ancestral South Indian, ANI=Ancestral North Indian, which are the two principal components of variation in the Indian population.
The surprise comes in what the Indian group is most closely related to.
The Indian group + the Tajik are most closely related to a group that includes the Saami, Mansi, Tlingit, Aleut, etc. The Saami are the northern-most indigenous people of Europe, today living in far north Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Kola peninsula of Russia. The Mansi are a Uralic people. The rest are indigenous peoples of the Americas, who separated from old world populations at least 16,000 years ago.
Where are the Indo-European group? Largely here in the pink group.
Notice that Iranians are not as close to the people who live at and around the Indus valley - the Brahui, Makrani, Balochi, Kalash, Burusho, Pathan, Sindhi, Punjabi as the entire indigenous American group, as per this tree. Wherever agriculture came from to the Harappan civilization, it did not bring any significant Iranians or Iranian population explosion with it.
Notice that the whole ANI/ASI mixture of two-components population nevertheless places ANI closer to indigenous Americans than to any Indo-European speaking group. We see the problem with the genetic studies that use as a reference point for Indians the East European genomes. They have pre-determined the story they want to tell, of an Indo-European incursion into India from the west. But if this tree is correct, shouldn't ANI be looked at with an Amerindian reference point? I.e., two waves of people entered India many tens of thousands of years ago, first the ancestors of the ASI component, and then the ancestors of the ANI component, a branch of which also made their way over generations all the way east across Asia and into the Americas?
The Yamnaya invasion/migration story might help explain how all the non-Indian Indo-European speaking groups are related. The Brahmins, the age-old upholders of the Vedic culture, and the preservers of the oldest extant Indo-European literature, the Rg Veda, are solidly within ANI/ASI spectrum, and not as close to any of the other IE groups as they are to within-India groups. Whether ancient Sanskrit entered India or left India, it did so with no movement of people significant enough to leave a trace on the above tree.
IMO, on the face of it, this chart supports an independent agro-pastoralism in India and Robin Bradley Kar's ideas about proto-IndoEuropean.
In any case, there was no population explosion of outsiders bearing agriculture or horses relative to the native population of India. The idea of a civilization, that of the Saraswati-Sindhu whose language spread through cultural influence all the way from the Indus into the steppes without significant movement of people might be borne out.
trappedpawn 11p · 441 weeks ago
Developments in the last couple of years have convinced me. The problem is proponents of OIT are two emotionally invested and will find it rather hard to climb down from their positions, even though they have never furnished any research/proofs to bolster their claim.
macgupta 81p · 441 weeks ago
CIP · 441 weeks ago
This is in accord with the conventional view that Europeans and Asians probably separated after leaving Africa in the Middle East. East Asians then separated from South Asians in India and Amerindians and related groups separated from East Asians much later.
I have added the dispersal graph from the paper to my blog.
macgupta 81p · 441 weeks ago
To be precise, Tajiks are closer genetically related to Brahui, Kalash, Punjabis, etc., - people of the northwestern side of India, than they are to Iranians. Tajiks speaking Persian no more makes them genetically Iranian than your and my speaking English relates us closely genetically speaking.
And yes, East Asians, Amerindians separated from South Asians much later than Europeans and Asians separated. That is, the European reference point in all the ANI/ASI papers is mistaken; the correct group to relate ANI to lies in the East Asian or Amerindian. South Asians relate to the East Asian, Amerindian branches at lower level of the tree than to Europeans. But the Indo-European dogma and the agriculture dispersion dogmas make the authors always relate South Asians to Europeans.
CIP · 441 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 441 weeks ago
Guest · 441 weeks ago
A technical point: the common node shared between Indians and Amerindians is also shared with all East Asians, Australian Aborigines, and Oceanic peoples, so they are equally related. Indians (insofar as this graph indicates) are related to Amerindians to the same extent as they are related to Chinese or Papuans.
macgupta 81p · 441 weeks ago
It suggests that intermarriage, conquest, etc., has put only a tiny layer on top of many ethnic groups's genetic "substrate".
I also repeat that the confusion between culture, language and genetics is, in my opinion, is the cause of hidden assumptions in many papers on population genetics.
Guest · 441 weeks ago
See, e.g. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/f...
From the Abstract:
One, the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI), is genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans, whereas the other, the ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI), is as distinct from ANI and East Asians as they are from each other. By introducing methods that can estimate ancestry without accurate ancestral populations, we show that ANI ancestry ranges from 39–71% in most Indian groups, and is higher in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers. Groups with only ASI ancestry may no longer exist in mainland India. However, the indigenous Andaman Islanders are unique in being ASI-related groups without ANI ancestry.
macgupta 81p · 441 weeks ago
But more likely, there is an assumption built into the paper that you cite, which leads it to the conclusions above.
In this diagram, the split between ANI and Europeans is shown, but there should first be a split between Asians and Europeans, and then between East Asians and South Asians. Your comment above practically requires it to be so.
This is in accord with the conventional view that Europeans and Asians probably separated after leaving Africa in the Middle East. East Asians then separated from South Asians in India and Amerindians and related groups separated from East Asians much later.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/f...
Yes, Earth is close to Sirius, but it is closer to Alpha Centauri.
Guest · 441 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 441 weeks ago
tim · 315 weeks ago
As for closeness modern South Asians to Native Americans,here's my guess - this might be due to the all elusive AASI which is supposed to be an east eurasian ancestry closer to Australasians. Add to that the ANE(Ancient North Eurasian ancestry represented by Ma'lta Buret Boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_North_Euras... which is present in Native Americans and Steppe people.
tim · 313 weeks ago
The corresponding paper here at - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/32781236...
The authors propose that Munda speakers ancestors(particularly males) came roughly ~4,000 years and underwent a sex-biased admixture with the local females.
macgupta 81p · 312 weeks ago
:)
Guest · 312 weeks ago
Now, doesn't this mean that around 2000 BCE, whichever population was living in the eastern part of ganegtic plains, they were mostly AASI and had probably very little Iran_N ?
macgupta 81p · 311 weeks ago