Prompted by my posts, Dienekes, A teaser on the Kalash:
I am in the middle of a ChromoPainter/fineSTRUCTURE analysis of a broad dataset designed to explore certain mysteries that have often come up in my previous experiments. Barring the unexpected, the analysis should be completed sometime next week.
Below you can see the normalized number of “chunks” donated by various populations to the Kalash….
Here is the bar plot which Dienekes generated (left to right indicates extent of “donation” to the Kalash):
I highlighted the most significant non-South Asian donor. Dienekes states:
Of particular interest is the fact that all West Asian populations appear higher on the donor list than all Northern European ones, which confirms, using a haplotype-based approach, my previous inference that the Ancestral North Indian (ANI) component is related to West Asians.
The main issue I would point out is that “West Asians” are probably a major donor to both South Asians and Northern Europeans. In any case, the Lezgian are a North Caucasian non-Indo-Eurpean population. But this is what came to mind:
Geographical distribution of G:
In Turkey, the southern Caucasus region and Iran, haplogroup G reaches the highest percentage of a regional population worldwide. Among Turkish males 11% of the population is G.[4] In Iran, Haplogroup G reaches 13 to 15% of the population in various parts of the country. While it is found in percentages higher than 10% among the Bakhtiari, Gilaki and Mazandarani, it is closer to 5% among the Iranian Arabs and in some large cities.[25] Among the samples in the YHRD database from the southern Caucasus countries, 29% of the samples from Abazinia, 31% from Georgia, 18% from Azerbaijan and 11% from Armenia appear to be G samples.
In southern Asia, haplogroup G is found in concentrations of approximately 18%[26] to 20%[27] of Kalash, approximately 16% of Brahui,[27] and approximately 11.5% of sampled Pashtun,[26] but in only about 3% of the general Pakistani population.[26] The many groups in India and Bangla Desh have not been well studied. About 6% of the samples from Sri Lanka and Malaysia were reported as haplogroup G, but none were found in the other coastal lands of the Indian Ocean or Pacific Ocean in Asia.[28]
Otzi the Iceman was G, and G is found in mountains areas of Southern Europe, as well as among groups like Tamil Brahmins. My own hunch is that G came with men who first brought agriculture to Europe. This does not mean that they were among the first agriculturalists in South Asia, but there may be some deep connection to pulses out of the trans-Caucasian region.
As far as my initial assertion that the Kalash are a liminal South Asian population, that seems supported by the high matches to many South Asian groups. But my own contention was more specific: that the Kalash exhibit evidence of admixture with the indigenous people of Southern Eurasia, the “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), attesting to their deep origins within the subcontinent. This is not necessarily true even if they share a lot of haplotypes with South Asians, because the Kalash and Indians proper may share common donors for “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI). Nevertheless, they seem to have some relationship to the ANI-ASI cline identified by Reich et al. (albeit, possibly more complex than that of the Pathans).