Sunday, September 25, 2016

New indications on the peopling of India

The NYT reports:
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.

Comments (17)

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Shouldn't it be obvious that the ANI people brought the IndoEuropean language ( Sanskrit ) to India? Have you noticed the similarity between spoken balto-slavic languages and spoken Sanskrit? Progression of Kurgan -> Sintashta -> BMAC -> Swat ->Cemetry H -> Painted Gray Ware, I would argue is the path taken by ANI who brought PIE to India.

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.
1 reply · active 441 weeks ago
The ANI people are much older (40-16K years) than the currently accepted time horizon for languages (maximum 8000 years); that is the only way that they can be more closely related to the Amerindians than to other IE speakers.
I don't think that the interpretation of the figure is quite correct. The closest group to the Indian groups is Tajik (Iranian speaking peoples who live various places), suggesting that there is indeed a close link to Iran. The Amerindians and related groups are exactly as closely related to the South Asians as are the rest of the East Asians (they all share the same genetic branch).

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.
9 replies · active 441 weeks ago
Let's not confuse language with genetic relatedness. Yes, the Tajiks speak a variety of Persian. But they aren't as closely genetically related to Iranians as they are to Indians. You have to go up 5 or 6 levels up the tree before Tajiks relate to Iranians.

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.
Modern Iranians may be less related to Tajiks and Pashtun than some other groups, but there is ample evidence that the latter were of Iranian origin. Check out the relevant Wikipedia articles or the numerous historical and Archeological sources cited therein The conquests of the Persian empire spread their language and peoples broadly, and as usually happens, they often intermarried with local peoples.
But the genetic relatedness is not there! Exactly, they spread their language to a people not closely related to them.
The relevant words are conquered and intermarried with the locals. Humans are one species, so relatedness reflects intermarriage as well as ancient population separations.

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.
And yet South Asians are, by the neighbor-joining algorithm, closer related genetically to Amerindians and East Asians than they are to most peoples to the west of South Asia, despite undoubted amount of incursions, intermarriage etc. with the people to the west. It is very striking that the relatedness to Amerindians with whom there is undoubted isolation for at least 14,000 years is closer than relatedness, than, say to Iranians. Caveat: as shown by the neighbor-joining algorithm, as expressed in this set of genomes.

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.
Not correct. The ANI genetic affinities are with Central and West Eurasians, not East Asians. ASI are as different from ANI as they are from East Asians and must have separated from them a very long time 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.
Then the figure in this latest paper is wrong.

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.
You are confusing the ANI and Indians who currently live in the North. All Indians studied in the Reich paper (except Andamese) are mixtures of ANI and ASI, and consequently more related to each other than to outside groups like West Eurasians. The two papers are quite consistent, and David Reich is an author on both papers.
The papers are consistent, as I wrote, the Earth is close to Sirius. What the first Reich paper omits is that Earth is closer to Alpha Centauri.
"Wherever agriculture came from to the Harappan civilization, it did not bring any significant Iranians or Iranian population explosion with it. " --- I think you are comparing modern day Iranian populations as mentioned in above tree with the so-called Iran_Neolithic population. There have migrations to Iran from both west and North as evident from ancient DNA. But anyways, I don't think agriculture was brought by this so-called Iran_Neolithic population(which itself might stem from the western side of IVC area)

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.
Since people of india also include austro-asiatic speakers of central and eastern india , you may want to see this https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/science...

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.
3 replies · active 311 weeks ago
So which equid carried them to India?
:)
probably a rice eating one :) . But at least through this, we know that mundas were probably not present in the IVC . Another important thing highlighted in the paper is the autosomal ancestry of the Mundas. Apart from the south-east asian one, they have the east eurasian ancestry AASI (modeled by Onge due to lack of Ancient DNA) and some west asian ancestry(Iran_Neolithic). However, it seems that that Iran_N ancestry in Mundas is much lower than the nearby populations(hell,it's even lower than the tribes in south india) so the author hypothesize that the incoming mundas might have mixed with a 'Paniya' ( a tribe in south india) like population who have a very low Iran_N ancestry .
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 ?
So, since the Munda language family survived, they managed to come in and dominate the local population. Not, e.g., like the Mitanni, who had "Indo-Aryan" names and some vocabulary, but spoke a different language family. Some historical explanation would be useful, no?

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