Harvard Genetics Research Debunks Hindu Nationalist Myth of Racial Purity


"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."   Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar,  leader of the Hindu Nationalist RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)  

Debunking the myth of "the purity of the Race" pushed by  Hindu Nationalist leader Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, a Harvard study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics has found that vast majority of Indians today have descended from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations--Ancestral North Indians (ANIs) who migrated from Central Asia, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Europe,  and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent.

Source: World Values Survey and Washington Post


Geographically, Ancestral North Indians (ANIs) tend to be more concentrated in the northern and western parts of India closer to West Asia, while Ancestral South Indians are found mostly in southern and eastern parts of India.

The paper, titled "Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India" confirms that North Indians ancestors started migrating to India from outside thousands of years before the advent of Islam. ANIs and ASIs routinely intermarried between 4,200 and 1,900 years ago until the imposition of strict segregation by the Hindu caste system, according to the study.

Lactose Tolerance Map

With segregation strictly in place, the Indian society moved toward endogamy—the practice of avoiding intermarriage or close relationships between ethnic groups—which reached its most extreme form in the creation of the caste system which remains in force to this day. A 2011 report found that in “40 percent of the schools across sample districts in Uttar Pradesh—India’s most populous state, with 199 million people—teachers and students refuse to partake of government-sponsored free midday meals because they are cooked by dalits (untouchables).”

The paper is based on the work of researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the CSIR-Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India. They conducted what they call the “most comprehensive sampling of Indian genetic variation to date,” using samples collected from 571 individuals belonging to 73 “well-defined ethno-linguistic groups.” The data allowed the authors to trace not just the genetic mixture between these groups but how long ago this mixture occurred.

World IQ (Intelligence Quotient) Map (Source: Richard Lynn)


Similar genetic studies of Pakistanis published in the American Journal of Human Genetics have found very diverse ancestral origins of the people in the country. These range from Balochis with origins in Aleppo (modern Syria) to Brahuis who are indigenous Dravidian, and Baltis of Sino-Tibetan ancestry to Pashtuns of Jewish or Central Asian origins.

These genetic studies offer strong rebuttal of Hindu Nationalists' claims of "racial purity" of Hindus. Genetics confirm that most Indians (and Pakistanis) are, in fact, people of mixed or foreign ancestry regardless of their faith.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

World Values Survey Finds Indians Most Racist

Indians Admire Israel and Hitler

Caste Apartheid in India

Religion, Caste and Politics in India by Christophe Jaffrelot

Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

Who Killed Karkare?

Procrastinating on Hindutva Terror

India's Guantanamos and Abu Ghraibs

Hindutva Government in Israeli Exile?

Growing US-India Military Ties Worry Pakistan

The 21st Century Challenges For Resurgent India


Views: 920

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 26, 2013 at 5:44pm

Study finds genetic links between South Asians and Mesopotamians:

The continuing debate regarding the origins of people inhabiting ancient Mesopotamia during the region’s long history led the authors of a new report published in the Open Access journal PLoS ONE to attempt an isolation and analysis of mtDNA sequences from the area.
Origins of populations
Ancient DNA methodology was applied to analyse sequences extracted from freshly unearthed remains (teeth) of 4 individuals deeply deposited in the slightly alkaline soil of Tell Ashara (ancient Terqa) and Tell Masaikh (ancient Kar-Assurnasirpal) – Syrian archaeological sites, both in the middle Euphrates valley.
Research was also carried out by another team (Sołtysiak et al 2013) examining fifty-nine dental non-metric traits on a sample of teeth from 350 human skeletons excavated at three sites in the lower middle Euphrates valley. This showed a stable population until after the Mongolian invasion which resulted in a large depopulation of northern Mesopotamia in the 13th century CE. The final major change occurred during the 17th century with Bedouin tribes arriving from the Arabian Peninsula.
Difficult procedure
Although it is not possible with DNA analysis to reconstruct the details of an individual’s life, it can provide insights into his/her ancestry. In ideal conditions, the fossil sequences are isolated from remains unearthed in permafrost or temperate regions and only in rare circumstances from skeletal material found in a subtropical arid climate, as it is suspected that the potential is highly limited in such cases.
Thus, only scarce datasets from the Mesopotamia region are available, but using ancient DNA methodology, the team were able to confirm the possibility of isolating amplifiable sequences from the skeletons under just such challenging conditions. In the case of one of the studied specimens the researchers analysed both mtDNA and nuDNA sequences.
Three others were analysed only to confirm their origin on the basis of HVR-I sequence. Studied remains were excavated at two archaeological sites in the middle Euphrates valley and dated between the Early Bronze Age and the Late Roman period (between 2500 BCE and 500 CE).
Origins in the Indian subcontinent
The studied individuals carried mtDNA haplotypes corresponding to the M4b1, M49 and/or M61 haplogroups, which are believed to have arisen in the area of the Indian subcontinent during the Upper Palaeolithic and are absent in people living today in Syria. However, these same haplogroups are present in people inhabiting today’s Tibet, Himalayas, India and Pakistan.

The suggestion is that these analysed remains from Mesopotamia belonged to people with a genetic affinity to the Indian subcontinent as the distribution of identified ancient haplotypes indicates a solid link with populations from the region of South Asia-Tibet (Trans-Himalaya).
This may represent either that the individuals are descendants of migrants from much earlier times (Palaeolithic), spreading the clades of the macrohaplogroup M throughout Eurasia and founding regional Mesopotamian groups like that of Terqa, or they are from merchants moving along trade routes passing near or through the region.
The obtained data has enriched the modest database of Mesopotamian ancient DNA and suggests a possible genetic link of the region with the Indian subcontinent in the past. There are no traces in the modern Syrian population, which is explainable as the dental study showed, by later depopulation and recolonisation, but opens up the possibilities of further work to examine the routes of both populations and civilisations.

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/09/2013/genetic-li...

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 10, 2013 at 9:56pm

Here's a BBC report on genetic origins of Germans and Scandinavians:

DNA from ancient skeletons has revealed how a complex patchwork of prehistoric migrations fashioned the modern European gene pool.

The study appears to refute the picture of Europeans as a simple mixture of indigenous hunters and Near Eastern farmers who arrived 7,000 years ago.

The findings by an international team have been published in Science journal.

DNA was analysed from 364 skeletons unearthed in Germany - an important crossroads for prehistoric cultures.

"This is the largest and most detailed genetic time series of Europe yet created, allowing us to establish a complete genetic chronology," said co-author Dr Wolfgang Haak of the Australian Centre for DNA (ACAD) in Adelaide.

"Focusing on this small but highly important geographic region meant we could generate a gapless record, and directly observe genetic changes in 'real-time' from 7,500 to 3,500 years ago, from the earliest farmers to the early Bronze Age."

Dr Haak and his colleagues analysed DNA extracted from the teeth and bones of well-preserved remains from the Mittelelbe-Saale region of Germany. They focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) - the genetic information in the cell's "batteries".

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

When you look at today's populations, what you are seeing is a hazy palimpsest of what actually went on to create present-day patterns”

Dr Spencer Wells
Director, Genographic Project
MtDNA is passed down from a mother to her children, allowing geneticists to probe the maternal histories of populations. Geneticists recognise a variety of mitochondrial DNA "clans", or lineages, in human populations. And each of these lineages has its own distinct history.

The team's results show that indigenous hunter-gatherers in Central Europe were edged out by incomers from Anatolia (modern Turkey) some 7,500 years ago. A majority of the hunters belonged to the maternal clan known as haplogroup U, whilst the farmers carried a selection of genetic lineages characteristic of the Near East.

Around 6,100 years ago, farming was introduced to Scandinavia, which coincided with the appearance of Neolithic mtDNA lineages in that region too.

"In some ways agriculture was an obvious and easy way to go in the Fertile Crescent. But once you take it out of there, it involves an abrupt shift in lifestyle," said Dr Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project and an Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, adding that early agricultural groups were living "on the edge".

"They were basically taking crops that had evolved over millions of years in the Middle East and were adapted to that dry-wet pattern of seasonality and moving them into an area that was recently de-glaciated.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24475342

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 10, 2014 at 11:00pm

Here's a Dawn story on Sanskrit vs Dravidian:

The Rig Veda is the first document indicative of a turning point that subsequently changed the entire course of history in the subcontinent, paving the way for what the latter came to be known as the Indian civilization. Hindu fundamentalists beholden to Hindutva (Hinduness) spin a phony counter narrative claiming that the Aryans were the original inhabitants of the subcontinent spreading to Europe from here as their counterparts here propagate that the Muslims of Pakistan came from Arabia, Iran and Central Asia.

Hindu fundamentalists in their religion, driven by nationalistic zeal, try to illegitimately appropriate what was indigenous to the Indus valley prior to the arrival of the Arya, while the Muslims fundamentalists in their puritanical streak try to illegitimately own what is foreign. For ideological considerations the former take pride in proving themselves to be locals i.e., sons of the soil, while the latter boast of their self glory as foreigners i.e., successful invaders. Both distort history. Sense of history is what we lack in the subcontinent whatever faith we may belong to.

Let us begin with the word Sanskrit which means ‘composed’, ‘perfect’ or ‘synthesized’. The language was called Sanskrit because it was formulated in the grammar books by grammarians. In a contrast with it, other languages or dialects were called Prakrits which means the ‘naturals’. Sanskrit was not a natural language spoken by the people. It was also different from the Vedic used in the Vedas, the earliest version of the language of the Ayra.

Why did such a need arise to construct a language which was removed from the common speech of the masses? What were the historical conditions which compelled the Aryan elite to forge a linguistic edifice, artificial and detached? To put it simply, it was Aryan invasions which created a long-lasting atmosphere of hostility between the victors and the vanquished, forcing the former to carve out exclusive and sanitized spaces in the domains of religion, politics and culture.

Historical conditions in the wake of Aryan victory necessitated a new division of different sections of society to consolidate the gains of ascendancy to the advantage of the new settlers. What struck the newcomers as something quite different was the colour of the locals, their language and of course, their religion. That is why we hear the mentioning of ‘Varna’ the colour.

The Aryans were fair-complexioned while the Harappa people were dark-skinned. ‘Varna’ the colour initially formed the basis of new social division which created caste system pushing the local people down the social ladder to a point where they were reduced to a subhuman status. Some of the upper sections of Dravidians were accepted into the Ayran fold for political reasons as it was too difficult for the nomads to administer the organized and complex society of the Indus valley. Indra, the Aryan warlord

after having gained victory, invites the Asura chief (Asura was one of the main tribes of Indus valley) to jointly rule the territories. As to the language of the Dravidians, the well-known word ‘Malechha’ gives us a clue. ‘Malechha’ initially meant a foreign unintelligible speech. ‘Sata pathabrahmna’ narrates how the Dravidians were deprived of their speech. “...

http://www.dawn.com/news/784719/language-dravidian-versus-sanskrit

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 13, 2015 at 7:55pm

Origins of races in India:

The species known as Ramapithecus was found in the Siwalik foothills of the northwestern Himalayas. This species believed to be the first in the line of hominids lived some 14 million years ago. Researches have found that a species resembling the Australopithecus lived in India some 2 million years ago. Scientists have so far not been able to account for an evolutionary gap of as much as 12 million years since the appearance of Ramapithecus.

The people of India belong to different anthropological stocks. According to Dr. B. S. Guha, the population of India is derived from six main ethnic groups:

(1) Negritos: The Negritos or the brachycephalic (broad headed) from Africa were the earliest people to inhabit India. They are survived in their original habitat in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Jarewas, Onges, Sentelenese and Great Andamanis tribes are the examples. Studies have indicated that the Onges tribes have been living in the Andamans for the last 60,000 years. Some hill tribes like Irulas, Kodars, Paniyans and Kurumbas are found only in patches among the hills of south India on the mainland.

(2) Pro-Australoids or Austrics: This group was the next to come to India after the Negritos. They represent a race of people, with wavy hair plentifully distributed over their brown bodies, long heads with low foreheads and prominent eye ridges, noses with low and broad roots, thick jaws, large palates and teeth and small chins. Austrics tribes, which are spread over the whole of India, Myanmar and the islands of South East Asia, are said to "form the bedrock of the people". The Austrics were the main builders of the Indus Valley Civilisation. They cultivated rice and vegetables and made sugar from sugarcane. Their language has survived in the Kol or Munda (Mundari) in Eastern and Central India.

(3) Mongoloids: These people have features that are common to those of the people of Mongolia, China and Tibet. These tribal groups are located in the Northeastern part of India in states like Assam, Nagaland and Meghalya and also in Ladakh and Sikkim. Generally, they are people of yellow complexion, oblique eyes, high cheekbones, sparse hair and medium height. 

(4) Mediterranean or Dravidian: This group came to India from the Southwest Asia and appear to be people of the same stock as the peoples of Asia Minor and Crete and the pre-Hellenic Aegeans of Greece. They are reputed to have built up the city civilization of the Indus Valley, whose remains have been found at Mohenjodaro and Harappa and other Indus cities. The Dravidians must have spread to the whole of India, supplanting Austrics and Negritos alike. Dravidians comprise all the three sub-types, Paleo-Mediterranean, the true Mediterranean and Oriental Mediterranean. This group constitutes the bulk of the scheduled castes in the North India. This group has a sub-type called Oriental group.

(5) Western Brachycephals: These include the Alpinoids, Dinaries and Armenois. The Coorgis and Parsis fall into this category.

(6) Nordics: Nordics or Indo-Aryans are the last immigrants into India. Nordic Aryans were a branch of Indo-Iranians, who had originally left their homes in Central Asia, some 5000 years ago, and had settled in Mesopotamia for some centuries. The Aryans must have come into India between 2000 and 1500 B.C. Their first home in India was western and northern Punjab, from where they spread to the Valley of the Ganga and beyond. These tribes are now mainly found in the Northwest and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). Many of these tribes belong to the "upper castes".

http://www.culturopedia.net/Tribes/tribesintro.html

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 25, 2016 at 7:52pm

Fact check: #India wasn't the first place #Sanskrit was recorded – it was #Syria. #Modi #BJP 

http://scroll.in/article/737715/fact-check-india-wasnt-the-first-pl... … via @scroll_in


As the Narendra Modi government celebrates Sanskrit, a look at the oldest known speakers of the language: the Mitanni people of Syria.

After yoga, Narendra Modi has turned his soft power focus to Sanskrit. The Indian government is enthusiastically participating in the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok. Not only is it sending 250 Sanskrit scholars and partly funding the event, the conference will see the participation of two senior cabinet ministers: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who inaugurated the conference on Sunday, and Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani, who will attend its closing ceremony on July 2. Inexplicably, Swaraj also announced the creation of the post of Joint Secretary for Sanskrit in the Ministry of External Affairs. How an ancient language, which no one speaks, writes or reads, will help promote India’s affairs abroad remains to be seen.

On the domestic front, though, the uses of Sanskrit are clear: it is a signal of the cultural nationalism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Sanskrit is the liturgical language of Hinduism, so sacred that lower castes (more than 75% of modern Hindus) weren’t even allowed to listen to it being recited. Celebrating Sanskrit does little to add to India’s linguistic skills – far from teaching an ancient language, India is still to get all its people educated in their modern mother tongues. But it does help the BJP push its own brand of hyper-nationalism.

Unfortunately, reality is often a lot more complex than simplistic nationalist myths. While Sanskrit is a marker of Hindu nationalism for the BJP, it might be surprised, even shocked, to know that the first people to leave behind evidence of having spoken Sanskrit aren't Hindus or Indians – they were Syrians.

The Syrian speakers of Sanskrit

The earliest form of Sanskrit is that used in the Rig Veda (called Old Indic or Rigvedic Sanskrit). Amazingly, Rigvedic Sanskrit was first recorded in inscriptions found not on the plains of India but in in what is now northern Syria.

Between 1500 and 1350 BC, a dynasty called the Mitanni ruled over the upper Euphrates-Tigris basin, land that corresponds to what are now the countries of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. The Mitannis spoke a language called Hurrian, unrelated to Sanskrit. However, each and every Mitanni king had a Sanskrit name and so did many of the local elites. Names include Purusa (meaning “man”), Tusratta (“having an attacking chariot”), Suvardata (“given by the heavens”), Indrota (“helped by Indra”) and Subandhu, a name that exists till today in India.

Imagine that: the irritating, snot-nosed Subandhu from school shares his name with an ancient Middle Eastern prince. Goosebumps. (Sorry, Subandhu).

The Mitanni had a culture, which, like the Vedic people, highly revered chariot warfare. A Mitanni horse-training manual, the oldest such document in the world, uses a number of Sanskrit words: aika (one), tera (three), satta (seven) and asua (ashva, meaning “horse”). Moreover, the Mitanni military aristocracy was composed of chariot warriors called “maryanna”, from the Sanskrit word "marya", meaning “young man”.

The Mitanni worshipped the same gods as those in the Rig Veda (but also had their own local ones). They signed a treaty with a rival king in 1380 BC which names Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas (Ashvins) as divine witnesses for the Mitannis. While modern-day Hindus have mostly stopped the worship of these deities, these Mitanni gods were also the most important gods in the Rig Veda.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 6, 2017 at 8:28am

#Aryan Invasion Destroyed #Indus Civilization,Changed #India's Bronze-Age Population #IVC #Pakistan https://shar.es/1BOV3b via @LiveScience

An influx of men from the steppe of Central Asia may have swept into India around 3,500 years ago and transformed the population.

----
The new data confirm a long-held but controversial theory that Sanskrit, the ancient language of Northern India, emerged from an earlier language spoken by an influx of people from Central Asia during the Bronze Age. [24 Amazing Archaeological Discoveries]

An influx of men from the steppe of Central Asia may have swept into India around 3,500 years ago and transformed the population. The same mysterious people — ancient livestock herders called the Yamnaya who rode wheeled chariots and spoke a proto-Indo-European language — also moved across Europe more than 1,000 years earlier. Somehow, they left their genetic signature with most European men, but not women, earlier studies suggest. The new data confirm a long-held but controversial theory that Sanskrit, the ancient language of Northern India, emerged from an earlier language spoken by an influx of people from Central Asia during the Bronze Age. [24 Amazing Archaeological Discoveries]
---------
From the earliest days of colonial rule in India, linguists like William Jones and Jakob Grimm (who co-edited "Grimm's Fairy Tales") noticed that Sanskrit shared many similarities with languages as disparate as French, English, Farsi (or Persian) and Russian. Linguists eventually arrived at the conclusion that all these languages derived from a common ancestral language, which they dubbed Indo-European.

But while North Indian languages are predominantly Indo-European, South Indian languages mostly belong to the Dravidian language family. To explain this, scholars proposed the so-called Aryan invasion theory — that a group of people from outside India swept in and brought a proto-Sanskrit language to northern India. (The name "Aryans" came from a Sanskrit word for "noble" or "honorable.") In the early 1900s, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler proposed that these Aryan people may have conquered, and caused the collapse of, the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in what is now India and Pakistan.

----

..... In the early 1900s, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler proposed that these Aryan people may have conquered, and caused the collapse of, the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in what is now India and Pakistan. 
-----------------

The team found evidence that people began colonizing India more than 50,000 years ago and that there were multiple waves of migration into India from the northwest over the last 20,000 years, including waves of people from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago.

But evidence for one migration was particularly striking: The genetic makeup of the Y chromosome dramatically shifted about 4,000 to 3,800 years ago, the study found. About 17.5 percent of Indian men carry a Y-chromosome subtype, or haplogroup, known as R1, with the haplogroup more dominant in men in the north compared to the south of India.

The team found evidence that people began colonizing India more than 50,000 years ago and that there were multiple waves of migration into India from the northwest over the last 20,000 years, including waves of people from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago. But evidence for one migration was particularly striking: The genetic makeup of the Y chromosome dramatically shifted about 4,000 to 3,800 years ago, the study found. About 17.5 percent of Indian men carry a Y-chromosome subtype, or haplogroup, known as R1, with the haplogroup more dominant in men in the north compared to the south of India.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 21, 2017 at 9:03am

Do You Also Have This Genetic 'Indian' Disease?All us Indians carry one copy of a rare, recessive disease but if you have two of these, you are going to get sick.

http://doctor.ndtv.com/living-healthy/do-you-also-have-this-genetic...

People living in India and other South Asian countries are particularly vulnerable to rare genetic diseases, according to a genomic analysis that may help detect and prevent population-specific disorders. Several diseases specific to South Asian populations had been identified in the past, but the genetic causes of the vast majority remained largely mysterious.
The study, led by Harvard Medical School (HMS) in the US and the CSIR - Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, reveals that so-called founder events - in which a small number of ancestors give rise to many descendants - significantly contributed to high rates of population-specific, recessive diseases in the region. "Our work highlights an opportunity to identify mutations that are responsible for population-specific disease and to test for and decrease the burden of recessive genetic diseases in South Asia," said David Reich, professor of genetics at HMS and co-senior author of the study.

"Much of the focus of genetic research in India has been on diseases such as diabetes, thalassemia or sickle cell anaemia that are prevalent across populations," said Kumarasamy Thangaraj, a scientist at the CCMB. "But that misses the huge burden of disease caused by rare conditions," said Thangaraj, co-senior author of the study published in the journal Nature Genetics. "I hope this study motivates people in India to study the genetic features that are specific to each of these groups and to try to translate this to actionable medical research," added Thangaraj.

"This is an opportunity to improve health for many in the Indian subcontinent," he said. The Indian subcontinent is one of the most genetically diverse places on Earth, with a population approaching 1.5 billion that includes nearly 5,000 well-defined subgroups, researchers said.

They analysed genome-wide data from more than 2,800 people from over 260 South Asian subgroups and found that nearly one-third of these subgroups derived from distinctive founder events. Such founder events tend to limit genetic diversity. Geographic, linguistic or cultural barriers, such as restrictions on marriage between groups, increase the likelihood that mates share much of the same ancestry.

This can lead to the perpetuation and proliferation of certain rare, recessive diseases, researchers said. "Everybody carries a small number of mutations that could cause severe disease, but each person usually only has one copy - and two copies are needed to get sick," said the study's first author, Nathan Nakatsuka, a graduate student in the Reich lab.

"If parents have the same common ancestry, there is a greater risk that they will both carry the same recessive mutation, so their offspring are at much greater risk of inheriting the two copies needed to manifest disease," said Nakatsuka. Although the prevalence of these genetic variants increases disease risk, it also makes them easier to detect.

In the West, studies of similarly isolated populations have resulted in the discovery of many disease-causing genetic variants. This has led to screening practices that have reduced the incidence of disease. The most well-known examples are tests that screen people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent for the genetic variants that cause Tay-Sachs disease.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 21, 2017 at 9:04am

Gujjar tribespeople in Kashmir. The group is among 14 others in South Asia that has over a million people but probably started with major genetic contributions from just 100 people or fewer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/health/india-south-asia-castes-g...

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3917.html?fo...

In certain states in southern India, anesthesiologists know to ask anyone undergoing surgery whether they belong to the Vysya, a regional group traditionally associated with traders and businesspeople.

Anecdotally, medical workers know that some people with Vysya ancestry — who live primarily in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — have had fatal responses to common muscle relaxants, so doctors will use a different combination of drugs.

The Vysya may have other medical predispositions that have yet to be characterized — as may hundreds of other subpopulations across South Asia, according to a study published in Nature Genetics on Monday. The researchers suspect that many such medical conditions are related to how these groups have stayed genetically separate while living side by side for thousands of years.

South Asians should be viewed not as a single population but as thousands of distinct groups reinforced by cultural practices that promote marrying within one’s community. Although recent changes to cultural norms have resulted in more marriages between members of different groups like castes or subcastes, especially in some urban areas, gene flow between populations was restricted for millenniums, the authors report.

Marriage within a limited group, or endogamy, has created millions of people who are susceptible to recessive diseases, which develop only when a child inherits a disease-carrying gene from both parents, said Kumarasamy Thangaraj, an author of the study and a senior scientist at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad.

----------

Today, South Asia consists of around 5,000 anthropologically well-defined groups. Over 15 years, the researchers collected DNA from people belonging to a broad swath of these groups, resulting in a rich set of genetic data that pushes beyond the field’s focus on individuals of European ancestry, Dr. Reich said.

The scientists then looked at something called the founder effect. When a population originates from a small group of founders that bred only with each other, certain genetic variants can become amplified, more so than in a larger starting population with more gene exchange.


----------

The strongest of these founder groups most likely started with major genetic contributions from just 100 people or fewer. Today, 14 groups with these genetic profiles in South Asia have estimated census sizes of over one million. These include the Gujjar, from Jammu and Kashmir; the Baniyas, from Uttar Pradesh; and the Pattapu Kapu, from Andhra Pradesh. All of these groups have estimated founder effects about 10 times as strong as those of Finns and Ashkenazi Jews, which suggests the South Asian groups have “just as many, or more, recessive diseases,” said Dr. Reich, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage himself. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 1, 2017 at 4:04pm

Aryan Invasion May Have Transformed India's Bronze-Age Population
By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer

https://www.livescience.com/59703-north-india-populated-by-central-...

An influx of men from the steppe of Central Asia may have swept into India around 3,500 years ago and transformed the population.

The same mysterious people — ancient livestock herders called the Yamnaya who rode wheeled chariots and spoke a proto-Indo-European language — also moved across Europe more than 1,000 years earlier. Somehow, they left their genetic signature with most European men, but not women, earlier studies suggest.

The new data confirm a long-held but controversial theory that Sanskrit, the ancient language of Northern India, emerged from an earlier language spoken by an influx of people from Central Asia during the Bronze Age. [24 Amazing Archaeological Discoveries]

"People have been debating the arrival of the Indo-European languages in India for hundreds of years," said study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England. "There's been a very long-running debate about whether the Indo-European languages were brought from migrations from outside, which is what most linguists would accept, or if they evolved indigenously."

Aryan invasion theory

From the earliest days of colonial rule in India, linguists like William Jones and Jakob Grimm (who co-edited "Grimm's Fairy Tales") noticed that Sanskrit shared many similarities with languages as disparate as French, English, Farsi (or Persian) and Russian. Linguists eventually arrived at the conclusion that all these languages derived from a common ancestral language, which they dubbed Indo-European.

But while North Indian languages are predominantly Indo-European, South Indian languages mostly belong to the Dravidian language family. To explain this, scholars proposed the so-called Aryan invasion theory — that a group of people from outside India swept in and brought a proto-Sanskrit language to northern India. (The name "Aryans" came from a Sanskrit word for "noble" or "honorable.") In the early 1900s, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler proposed that these Aryan people may have conquered, and caused the collapse of, the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in what is now India and Pakistan.

The Aryan migration theory eventually became controversial because it was used to justify claims of superiority for different Indian subgroups; was claimed as the basis for the caste system; and in a bastardized form, was incorporated into Nazi ideology that the Aryans were the "master race."

What's more, earlier genetic data did not seem to corroborate the notion of a dramatic Aryan influx into India during the Bronze Age, according to a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 3, 2017 at 8:40am

Southern Europeans More African Than Thought
By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | June 3, 2013 03:00pm ET
https://www.livescience.com/37092-southern-europeans-have-african-g...


Southern Europeans get a significant portion of their genetic ancestry from North Africa, new research suggests.

The findings are perhaps not surprising, given that the Romans occupied North Africa and set up extensive trade routes in the region, and the Moors, a North African people, ruled a medieval territory called El-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula.

But the findings, published today (June 3) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest the impact of these connections went beyond culture and architecture, and may explain why Southern Europeans have more genetic diversity than their northern counterparts.

"The higher level of genetic variation in Southern Europeans reflects gene flow from North Africa during historical times. We're talking about the last 2,000 years, really from the Middle Ages during which there was occupation in Spain," said study co-author Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University.

More diverse

Past studies had shown that Southern Europeans such as Spaniards, Greeks and Italians had more genetic variability than people from Northern Europe; other studies showed they had a small percentage of what looked like sub-Saharan ancestry. [The 10 Things That Make Humans Unique]

Some argued that this genetic diversity came from the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe or the Roman contact with North African civilizations such as Carthage around 2,000 years ago.

But because researchers didn't have DNA samples from people in North Africa, the link was difficult to prove.

Substantial mixing

To untangle European ancestry, Bustamante and his colleagues compared existing DNA samples of 2,099 individuals from 43 different populations in Europe and Africa. Crucially, they included new genetic samples from North Africa and Spain.

The team found that for Southwestern Europeans (those from Italy, Spain and Greece), between 4 and 20 percent of their genomes came from North Africa, compared to less than 2 percent in Southeastern Europe.

The study also found that the apparent sub-Saharan ancestry in these populations was actually the result of North African lineage.

Many contacts

The findings suggest contacts between the two continents left traces in the genetics of people of the Iberian Peninsula.

"Studies such as this are key to improving our understanding of the impact of historical events and migration patterns in recent human history," Graham Coop, a population geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. "There had been evidence of this contribution before, but the magnitude of the genome-wide contribution had been underestimated, in part due to the lack of dense sampling of Northern African populations."

Though the findings are fascinating, the study researchers weren't able to resolve how much of this North African genetic component emerged during Roman times versus during the more modern Moorish occupation, said Priya Moorjani, a geneticist from Harvard University, who was not involved in the study.

"It would be really exciting to look at all these events, but with modern DNA it can be quite hard to do that."

Instead, looking at ancient DNA from fossil skeletons of Romans and Moors could help to answer those more detailed questions, Moorjani said.

Comment

You need to be a member of PakAlumni Worldwide: The Global Social Network to add comments!

Join PakAlumni Worldwide: The Global Social Network

Pre-Paid Legal


Twitter Feed

    follow me on Twitter

    Sponsored Links

    South Asia Investor Review
    Investor Information Blog

    Haq's Musings
    Riaz Haq's Current Affairs Blog

    Please Bookmark This Page!




    Blog Posts

    Biden's Gaza Ceasefire Veto Defies American Public Opinion

    Aaron Bushnell, an active serviceman in the United States Air Force, burned himself to death in front of the Israeli Embassy in protest against the US policy in Gaza. Before setting himself on fire in what he called an "extreme act of protest", he said he would "no longer be complicit in genocide". Polls show that the vast majority (63%) of Americans want an immediate end to the carnage being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.  …

    Continue

    Posted by Riaz Haq on February 27, 2024 at 5:30pm

    Pakistan Elections: Imran Khan's Supporters Skillfully Used Tech to Defy Powerful Military

    Independent candidates backed by the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party emerged as the largest single block with 93 seats in the nation's parliament in the general elections held on February 8, 2024.  This feat was accomplished in spite of huge obstacles thrown in front of the PTI's top leader Imran Khan and his party leaders and supporters by Pakistan's powerful military…

    Continue

    Posted by Riaz Haq on February 16, 2024 at 9:22pm — 1 Comment

    © 2024   Created by Riaz Haq.   Powered by

    Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service