Indian culture came to Southeast Asia through Indian people
For nearly 1,000 years the kingdom of Champa occupied the coast of modern Vietnam, from Annam down to the Mekong delta. It was a maritime facing polity whose language was […]
The massive Indian migration to Southeast Asian
Over at my other weblog I put up a post, Indian Ancestry In Southeast Asia Is Older Than Statistical Genetic Tests Suggest. If you look at two populations in Southeast Asia and find one has Indian ancestry you often can’t find the admixture older than 1000 A.D. (in peninsular Malaysia there is more recent intermarriage …
Continue reading “The massive Indian migration to Southeast Asian”
Indian ancestry in Southeast Asia is older than statistical genetic tests suggest
The panels above are from a new preprint, Reconstructing the human genetic history of mainland Southeast Asia: insights from genome-wide data from Thailand and Laos. It’s an OK preprint, marked […]
Humanity’s second “cradle” in Southeast Asia
Pleistocene SundalandThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib and Spencer talk about a topic which they have visited before, the role of Southeast Asia in understanding the origin of our species.A generati…
The Indian admixture into Southeast Asia is not just a function of distance
In the comments to the post below about Indian ancestry in Thailand, some observed that this should not be surprising due to reciprocal gene flow and proximity. Implicitly, I think what is being suggested here is that there is isolation by distance and continuous gene flow. Obviously some of this is true, but there details […]
Indian Y chromosomes in Thailand
The region of modern Thailand has gone through a major cultural shift over the last 1,000 years. Today the zone of Austro-Asiatic speech in mainland Southeast Asia is fragmented. To the east, there are the Khmer people of Cambodia, as well as various “hill-tribes” in Thailand and Laos who also speak Austro-Asiatic dialects. To the […]
Indian Ancestry In Thailand During the Iron Age
A follow-up to my previous post, one of the “Iron Age” samples from Thailand seems a definite outlier in comparison to the other Iron Age and Bronze Age samples. There is suggestive evidence again of Indian ancestry, as one sees in the plot above. One of the samples from Thailand overlaps with the Cambodians and […]
Indian ancestry in Cambodia was present ~2,000 years ago
When STRUCTURE-style bar plots first emerged using the HGDP Cambodian samples, there were often strange residual components with affinities to South Asians. When Treemix was developed there were strange edges between South Asians and Cambodians. In discussions with Joe Pickrell, the author of Treemix, we both adduced this must be due to deep affinities to […]
Why Indian forms dominated Chinese forms in mainland Southeast Asia
On Twitter Peter Turchin had a question in response to me tweeting a new preprint on bioRxiv: I am particularly interested in what the data say about Indian genetic contributions — I thought that SE Asia just got Indian culture, without any subst…
A clash of civilizations along the lower Mekong
The lower Mekong region is a fascinating zone from the perspective of human geography and ethnography. Divided between Cambodia and Vietnam, until the past few centuries it was, in fact, part of the broader Khmer world, and historically part of successive Cambodian polities. Vietnam, as we know it, emerged in the Red River valley far to […]
Demographic replacement in Southeast Asia during the Holocene
Well sometimes you feel silly, and it’s not your fault. Yesterday our podcast on Sundaland went live (we talked about Doggerland and Beringia too!). Though I expressed a fair amount of skepticism, I took the argument that Stephen Oppenheimer presented in Eden of the East, that modern Austronesians are long-term residents of Southeast Asia, seriously. […]
South Asian gene flow into Burmese and Malays?
I happen to have a data set merged from the 1000 Genomes and Estonian Biocentre which has Malays, Burmans, and other assorted Southeast Asians, East Asians, and South Asians. In light of recent posts I thought I would throw out something in relation to this data set (you can download the data here). Above you […]
The Indonesian cline
Dienekes has touched upon it in detail, so I don’t have much to add. Except for two points: 1) The ancestry cline here is not due to isolation-by-distance, but the expansion of the Austronesian population rather precipitously ~4,000 years ago. As Dienekes observed this was rather clear by non-genetic means; this is just icing on […]
Southeast Asian migrations, Indians and Tai
If you have not read my post “To the antipode of Asia”, this might be a good time to do so if you are unfamiliar with the history, prehistory, and ethnography of mainland Southeast Asia. In this post I will focus on mainland Southeast Asia…
Asian Negritos are not one population
Negrito, Philippines. Credit: Ken Ilio
In the post below I mentioned that the Malaysian and Philippine Negritos seem to be two very distinct populations. This was something I wanted to explore in more detail, so I naturally decided to poke around the…
Bacteria tell the tale of human intercourse
The Pith: the genetic relationships between bacteria in our stomach can tell us a lot about the relationships between various groups of people. Additionally, the distribution of different strains of bacteria may have significant public health implicat…
To the antipode of Asia
Markers show populations sampled by HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium
The Pith: Southeast Asia was settled by a series of distinct peoples. The pattern of settlement can be discerned in part by examination of patterns of genetic variation. It seems like…
Language, genes, & peoples of Southeast Asia
As I am currently reading Victor Lieberman’s magisterial Strange Parallels: Volume 2. So I was very interested in a new paper from BMC Genetics, Genetic structure of the Mon-Khmer speaking groups and their affinity to the neighbouring Tai populat…