The intrusive Indo-Aryans had a huge demographic impact on South Asia
At the bottom of this post, I have posted a reformatted version of a table from the supplemental of The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia. It shows a model of three hypothetical ancestral groups which contribute to the variation of modern South Asians: AHG_related, a group distantly related to modern Andamanese …
Continue reading “The intrusive Indo-Aryans had a huge demographic impact on South Asia”
South Asian Genetics Open Thread
I’ll update this post as needed.
Most of the “East Asian” in East Bengalis is not from the Munda
I did some more data analysis. Added Tibetans, etc. Since some readers have more opinions than I do I’ll leave commentary up to them. Two notes 1) The “Northeast Indian” group includes populations like Mizos (I know that from the ID codes). They seem different from Nagas, who are more Tibetan 2) No idea why …
Continue reading “Most of the “East Asian” in East Bengalis is not from the Munda”
Most of the “East Asian” in East Bengalis is not from the Munda
I did some more data analysis. Added Tibetans, etc. Since some readers have more opinions than I do I’ll leave commentary up to them. Two notes 1) The “Northeast Indian” group includes populations like Mizos (I know that from the ID codes). They seem different from Nagas, who are more Tibetan 2) No idea why …
Continue reading “Most of the “East Asian” in East Bengalis is not from the Munda”
South Asian PCA
Doing some data analysis for my data job. Looking at the data sets some interesting patterns. I will explore further time permitting, but it looks to me that the Bengalis are on the Khasi/Tibeto-Burman cline, not the Munda cline. Basically, Bangladeshis are the inverse of the Khasi people to their north. After seeing these results …
Genetics of Kashmiris
People keep asking about this. But there was a paper, A Genome-Wide Search for Greek and Jewish Admixture in the Kashmiri Population. Basically, they aren’t anything you wouldn’t expect.
The first ancient DNA from R1a1a-Z93 6,000 years ago in Ukraine (with lactase persistence!)
A new paper for David Anthony mentions something which I had missed: The currently oldest sample with Anatolian Farmer ancestry in the steppes in an individual at Aleksandriya, a Sredni Stog cemetery on the Donets in eastern Ukraine. Sredni Stog has often been discussed as a possible Yamnaya ancestor in Ukraine (Anthony 2007: 239-254). The …
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 33: Scandinavian Genetics
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 33: Scandinavian GeneticsBirch ForestThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Dr. Torsten Gunther about the genetics of ancient Scandinavians.There are a…
Humanity on the edge of the world
Nordic “Northern Lights”One of the most curious aspects of our species, in particular, modern humanity, is our tendency to wander, to push the limits of habitation beyond reason for rhyme. Humans have been using tools for millions of years, and Neander…
Of proteins and paleontology
Ostrich eggAncient DNA has transformed our understanding of the biological past. The sequencing of mammoths, moa, and Neanderthal have opened up a window upon evolution which we had previously only perceived through material remains. Whereas 20 years a…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 32: Tibetan Denisovans!
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 32: Tibetan Denisovans!Denisovan MandibleThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Dr. Frido Welker, a pioneer in the field of ancient protein phylogeneti…
What The All-Father Means
Readers of this weblog may sometimes notice that I break out in pompous and self-important declarations of being a “scion of the All-Father.” This is basically a joke. But, it’s a joke that draws from a legitimate basis of science and mythology. The “All-Father” is another name for Odin. I’m really talking about Indra, who …
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 31: Obesity & Genetic Prediction
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 31: Obesity & Genetic PredictionThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Dr. Amit Khera, a cardiologist, and geneticist. We talk about the relationsh…
Population genetics + “deep learning”
Population genetics is many things, but a popular field that gets written up in Wired or the tech-press is usually not one of those things. It emerged out of Mendelian genetics in the early decades of the 20th-century, transforming elegant pedigrees in…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 28: Altitude Adaptation and Denisovans
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 28: Altitude Adaptation and DenisovansK2This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, a computational biologist at Brown University abou…
Genetic variation across many South Asian communities
Someone in the comments posted the results from The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia. I put the percentages with a few ratios in a Google doc. I don’t know what a lot of these groups are. Can readers illuminate? We need to be careful about the sample size, but I think there are …
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Lord Indra was a tan man
I get a fair amount of email related to questions about Indian genetics, as well as calls for me to adjudicate various controversies. A major problem with any “Aryan invasion theory” or its descendants, which posit non-trivial gene flow from the Eurasian steppe, is the possibility that the Indo-Aryan ancestors of nearly all South Asians …
The misunderstanding of epigenetics
Conrad Waddington’s “epigenetic landscape”In most graduate programs students must complete a series of oral exams or make a presentation to professors to “qualify” to proceed in their research. The goal here is to make sure that a student goes forward …
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 25: The $1,000 Genome
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 25: The $1,000 GenomeCitation: Rodrigo MartinezIf you haven’t, please fill out The Insight listener survey.This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Rodrigo Martinez of V…
Privacy in a social genomic age
I recently had a long conversation with Veritas Genetics’ Rodrigo Martinez for an episode of The Insight, our podcast on genetics and evolution. One of his major arguments is that we are entering into the age of the social genome.And the numbers don’t …