Pretty much any person of Indian subcontinental origin in the United States of a certain who isn’t very dark skinned has probably had the experience of being spoken to in Spanish at some point. When I was younger growing up in Oregon I had the experience multiple times of Spanish speakers, probably Mexican, pleading with me to interpret for them because there was no one else who seemed likely. It isn’t a genius insight to conclude I was most likely South Asian…but it wasn’t out of the question I was Mexican. This applies even more to lighter skinned South Asians. In the Central Valley of California, where there are many Sikhs from Punjabi and Mexicans, this confusion occurred a lot for some Indian kids.
Of course biogeographically there isn’t that much connection between South Asia and the New World. But it isn’t crazy that Christopher Columbus labelled the peoples of the New World “Indian.” After all, they were a brown-skinned people whose features were not African, East Asian, or West Eurasian. And, it turns out genetically there is a coincidence that connects the New World and South Asia: the mixed peoples of Latin America with Amerindian and European ancestry recapitulate an admixture which resembles what occurred in South Asia thousands of years ago. It looks as if about half the ancestry of South Asians is West Eurasian and half something more like eastern Eurasians.
On principles component analysis that means that South Asian and Mexican and Peruvian samples often overlap. This is somewhat curious because the non-West Eurasian ancestors of South Asians and Amerindians diverged in ancestry on the order of 25 to 45 thousand years before the present. And the Iberian ancestry of the mixed people of the New World is almost as far from the character of South Asian West Eurasian ancestry as you can get (in the parlance of this blog, lots of EEF, less CHG, not too much ANE).
A new paper, A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals, highlights another similarity: massive bias in biogeographic ancestry by sex. More precisely, the rank order of West Eurasian ancestry in South Asia is skewed like so: Y chromosome > whole-genome > mtDNA (as is evident in the above figure).
I actually began writing about this in the late 2000s, when the fact that South Asian mtDNA was very different from West Eurasian mtDNA, and South Asian Y chromosome was mostly West Eurasian, was obvious. Then work using genome-wide data sets began to point to massive intra-Eurasian admixture between very diverged lineages. The paper is not revolutionary, but worth reading for its thoroughness and how it brings together all the lines of evidence.
Finally, no ancient DNA. That’s probably for the future, but I don’t expect any surprises.
Citation: A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals.