Indra is absolved: The “caste system” predates the Indo-Aryans
In the near future the ancient DNA group led by David Reich will publish a bunch of stuff, and one paper will note that the variation in steppe ancestry in […]
Men’s language and women’s language
Indian English is a Prakrit, not a creole, says linguist Peggy Mohan. This part jumped out at me: You mention that women were likely barred from writing Vedic poetry. But […]
The day of the Dasa
Unless you have been sleeping today you may have noticed two important papers on South Asian historical population genetics have been published. The simple and short paper is An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers. The longer paper, which is basically a book if you read the supplements, is The […]
The Munda arrived in India 4,000 years ago (probably)
I didn’t plan to talk about the Munda any time soon, in part because I recently wrote a post, The Munda as upland rice cultivators, which outlined my views. But there is a new preprint with new samples which attempts to estimate admixture times using genome-wide data. You can see the results above, and, also […]
India vs. China, genetically diverse vs. homogeneous
About 36% of the world’s population are citizens of the Peoples’ Republic of China and the Republic of India. Including the other nations of South Asia (Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.), 43% of the population lives in China and/or South Asia. But, as David Reich mentions in Who We Are and How We Got Here China is […]
South Asian Genotype Project, Summer 2018 Update
I’ve put another update on the South Asian Genotype Project. If you’ve contributed since March check it out. Again, if you are interested: send me a 23andMe, Ancestry, MyHeritage, Family Tree DNA raw genotype file to contactgnxp -at- gmail.com. In the subject please put: “South Asian Genotype Project” The state/province your family is from Ethnolinguistic group If […]
No steppe ancestry in the the Rakhigarhi samples = non sequitur
Harappan site of Rakhigarhi: DNA study finds no Central Asian trace, junks Aryan invasion theory: The much-awaited DNA study of the skeletal remains found at the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi, Haryana, shows no Central Asian trace, indicating the Aryan invasion theory was flawed and Vedic evolution was through indigenous people. … “The Rakhigarhi human DNA […]
Rakhigarhi sample doesn’t have steppe ancestry (probably “Indus Periphery”)
We’ve been waiting for two years now, and it looks like they’re about to pull the trigger, Indus Valley People Did Not Have Genetic Contribution From The Steppes: Head Of Ancient DNA Lab Testing Rakhigarhi Samples: Niraj Rai, the head of the Ancient DNA Laboratory at Lucknow’s Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP), where the […]
The population genomics of South Asia is complicated, and politics doesn’t make it easier
Many people have been sending me links to this article, By rewriting history, Hindu nationalists aim to assert their dominance over India. Here’s a key section: The RSS asserts that ancestors of all people of Indian origin – including 172 million Muslims – were Hindu and that they must accept their common ancestry as part […]
The Dravidianization of India
On this week’s The Insight Spencer Wells and I talk about the Indo-Aryan arrival to South Asia. This was recorded very early last summer, and I’m rather unguarded (it’s well before I had the piece published in India Today). I think 2018 will finally be the year that a lot of South Asia will be […]
The Indo-Aryan migration to the Indian subcontinent
The piece is up at India Today. The headline and title are of course optimized for clicks. I would, for example, say that the Indo-Aryans came from the west, not the West. In the course of writing this it has become clear that many people have very specific commitments on this issue. I think it […]
On the genetic structure of Afro-Indians
The Pith: Afro-Indians are mostly African, with a substantial Indian minority ancestry. The latter is disproportionately female mediated. It also seems that that ancestry is more northwest Indian, and that natural selection has been operating upon them…
Every South Asian “Arab” a descendant of Muhammad!
Y chromosomes of self-identified Syeds from the Indian subcontinent show evidence of elevated Arab ancestry but not of a recent common patrilineal origin: Several cultural or religious groups claim descent from a common ancestor. The extent to which this claimed ancestry is real or socially constructed can be assessed by means of genetic studies. Syed […]
Present genetic variation is a weak guide to past genetic variation
As I’ve been harping on and on for the past few years that the patterns of contemporary genetic variation are probably only weakly tied to past patterns of genetic variation (though Henry Harpending warned me about this as far back as 2004). A …
Proper methods and false results
The Pith: Honorable intent and punctilious adherence to proper form and method does not guarantee a set of results which flesh out a genuine phenomenon. Much of science is tragic.
Most of the time I point to and review papers on this weblog which excit…
Visualization of genetic distances, part n
Zack Ajmal has been taking his Reference 3 data set for a stroll over at the Harappa Ancestry Project. Or, more accurately, he’s been driving his computer to crunch up ADMIXTURE results ascending up a later of K’s. Because it is the Harappa…
Genetics as the myth buster: Indian edition
Whenever Zack Ajmal posts a new update to the Harappa Ancestry Project he appends some data to his ethnic database. This sends me to Wikipedia, because how many people are supposed to know what a “Muslim Rawther” means? Well, if you are a M…
Some of the Indo-Europeans found?
School girls in Hunza, Pakistan A few days ago I observed that pseudonymous blogger Dienekes Pontikos seemed intent on throwing as much data and interpretation into the public domain via his Dodecad Ancestry Project as possible. What are the long term implications of this? I know that Dienekes has been cited in the academic literature, […]
South Asians too are sons of the farmers?
I mentioned a few days ago that a friend was trying to get together some data to analyze the genetic variation of South Asians. By a strange coincidence Dienekes just published a more detailed analysis of South Asians…and uncovered something very interesting, though not that surprising. Some technical preliminaries: A note of caution: The reduced […]
Sons of the conquerors: the story of India?
The past ten years has obviously been very active in the area of human genomics, but in the domain of South Asian genetic relationships in a world wide context it has seen veritable revolutions and counter-revolutions. The final outlines are still to be determined. In the mid-1990s the conventional wisdom was that South Asians were […]