Category: Genetics

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A Maharashtra Deshastha Brahmin sent me his sample. He plots with the Maharashtra Kayastha. He’s much more like a South Indian Brahmin than a North Indian Brahmin. The Maharashtra Saraswat Brahmin seems more north shifted.

There are 20 million Hui people in China. These are traditionally Chinese-speaking Muslims. Though they are found in every region of China (and in the Chinese Diaspora), they are concentrated […]

I got a sample from someone where one parent was a West Bengal Sagdop, and another parent a Baidya with family origins in East Bengal. One hypothesis that I’ve see is that Baidya are basically Brahmins who lost their caste. Genetically this does not seem to be the case. Bengali Brahmins shift considerably toward the…

The mitochondrial genomes of two Pre-historic Hunter Gatherers in Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka is an island in the Indian Ocean connected by the sea routes of the Western and Eastern worlds. Although settlements of anatomically modern humans date back to 48,000 years, to date there is no genetic information on pre-historic individuals in Sri Lanka.…

I noticed something interesting a few weeks ago in the supplements of the Genomes Asian 1000K paper. Look at where the Toda are on the PCA. Now look at the Indus Valley samples I have…. I don’t have access to the Toda samples. But there’s a lot of evidence that this is a very unique…

Sometimes people pass me data. Turns out Rajasthani Brahmins are quite different from UP Brahmins (more northwest-shifted). In this, they are like Pandits. In contrast, Bihar Babhans are just like UP Brahmins, who don’t seem to have much structure. Gujarati Brahmins are between South Indian Brahmins and North Indian Brahmins, and closer to the latter,…

I got a few more samples with provenance. The Bengali Brahmins are shifte the way you would expect. The Bangladesh Kayastha (someone from a Hindu background) is in the cluster with generic Bangladeshis from Dhaka. The West Bengali Kayastha is far less East Asian. My current model right now is that the Kayasthas are basically…

There was some discussion online about variation among South Asians. I decided to compute a few pairwise Fst statistics (measures between population variation) with some South Asian, European and East Asian populations (along with Iranians). I plot them below in two graphs. Also I ran Treemix. I don’t have any major conclusion, just draw your…

There was some discussion online about variation among South Asians. I decided to compute a few pairwise Fst statistics (measures between population variation) with some South Asian, European and East Asian populations (along with Iranians). I plot them below in two graphs. Also I ran Treemix. I don’t have any major conclusion, just draw your…

The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool: The history of the British Isles and Ireland is characterized by multiple periods of major cultural change, including […]

The sequences of 150,119 genomes in the UK Biobank: We defined two other cohorts based on ancestry: African (XAF; n = 9,633; Extended Data Fig. 4) and South Asian (XSA; n = 9,252; Extended Data Fig. 5) (Fig. 3a–c). The 37,598 UKB individuals who do not belong to XBI, XAF or XSA were assigned to the cohort OTH (others).…

ArainGang, has posted a pretty interesting map of various ancestry components in the subcontinent by population. It’s pretty good, especially for the south and west of the subcontinent. But, there is something weird going on in the northeast: a lot of these populations have “Ancestral Indian” (Andamanese) ancestry but hardly anything else East Asian. This…

Nick Patterson has responded on his Substack to the NYRB piece Why Biology is not Destiny, which itself is an attack on Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery. Patterson […]