If you have not read my post “To the antipode of Asia”, this might be a good time to do so if you are unfamiliar with the history, prehistory, and ethnography of mainland Southeast Asia. In this post I will focus on mainland Southeast Asia, and how it relates implicitly to India and China genetically, and what inferences we can make about demography and history. Though I will touch upon the Malay peninsula in the preliminary results, I have removed the Indonesian and Philippine samples from the data set in totality. This means that in this post I will not touch upon spread of the Austronesians.
I present before you two tentative questions:
– What was the relationship of the spread of Indic culture to Indic genes in mainland Southeast Asia before 1000 A.D.?
– What was the relationship of the spread of Tai culture to Tai genes in mainland Southeast Asia after 1000 A.D.?
The two maps above show the distribution of Austro-Asiatic and Tai languages in mainland Southeast Asia. Observe that when you join the two together in a union they cover much of the eastern 2/3 of mainland Southeast Asia. …