Genetics and archaeogenetics of South Asia

Genetics and archaeogenetics of South Asia is the study of the genetics and archaeogenetics of the ethnic groups of South Asia. It aims at uncovering these groups' genetic history. The geographic position of South Asia makes its biodiversity important for the study of the early dispersal of anatomically modern humans across Asia.

Modern South Asians are descendants of a combination of Western Eurasian ancestries with an indigenous South Asian component termed "Ancient Ancestral South Indians" (AASI) closest to the non–West Eurasian part extracted from South Asian samples; distantly related to the Andamanese peoples, as well as to East Asians and Aboriginal Australians, as well as regional variable additional East/Southeast Asian components respectively.

Quotes about genetics and archaeogenetics of South Asia

B

• In reading the genetics literature on South Asia, it is very clear that many of the studies actually start out with some assumptions that are clearly problematic, if not in some cases completely untenable. Perhaps the single most serious problem concerns the assumption, which many studies actually start with as a basic premise, that the Indo-Aryan invasions are a well-established (pre)historical reality. The studies confirm such invasions in large part because they actually assume them to begin with.
  • Boivin N. 2007. Anthropological, historical, archaeological and genetic perspectives on the origins of caste in South Asia. In: Petraglia MD, Allchin B, editors. The evolution and history of human populations in South Asia: inter‐disciplinary studies in archaeology, biological anthropology, lin- guistics and genetics. Dordrecht: Springer. pp 341–361.
  • Quoted in M. Danino, in : Walimbe, S. R., & Schug, G. R. (2016). A companion to South Asia in the past. chapter 13. Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence

C

• [T]he present-day linguistic affinities of different Indian populations per se are perhaps among the most ambiguous and even potentially controversial lines of evidence in the reconstruction of prehistoric demographic processes in India.
  • G. Chaubey; M. Metspalu; T. Kivisild; R. Villems, "Peopling of South Asia: Investigating the Caste-Tribe Continuum in India", Bio Essays, 29 (2007), p. 97; quoted by M. Danino, "Genetics and the Aryan Issue" in History of Ancient India, vol. 3 (New Delhi: VIF, 2014), p. 53

E

• South Asia has indeed been at the crossroads for much of modern human prehistory.
  • Endicott P, Metspalu M, Kivisild T. 2007. Genetic evidence on modern human dispersals in South Asia: Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA perspectives: the world through the eyes of two haploid genomes. In: Petraglia MD, Allchin B, editors. The evolution and history of human popula- tions in South Asia: inter‐disciplinary studies in archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics and genetics. Dordrecht: Springer.
  • quoted in M. Danino, in : Walimbe, S. R., & Schug, G. R. (2016). A companion to South Asia in the past. chapter 13. Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence. Quoted in M Danino, I.3. Genetics and the Aryan Issue in : History of ancient India / editors, Dilip K. Chakrabarti and Makkhan Lal. v. 3

• Confusing language movements with demographic movements was a childhood disease of Indo-European linguistics before 1945. Especially after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), race thinking came to dominate the Humanities. There were warnings from Indo-Europeanists, including the much-maligned Friedrich Max Müller, to maintain the distinction, but the public and many professionals started speaking of “the Aryan race”, not in the vague sense common earlier (race = any group of hereditary belonging, from family to nation and race to humanity, Sanskrit jāti), but in the biological sense. After 1945, this went completely out of fashion in the West, but in India, not encumbered with the guilt about Nazi racism, time has stood still.
  • Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

F

• Nothing in the osteometric data shows that relationships existed between the populations of the Oxus Civilization and those of the steppes: these populations are separate, different. This would prove that if there were migrations, they were not significant at that time. Mixtures of steppe and oasis populations do not become significant until the time when corpses disappear through cremation or exposure.
  • Henri-Paul Francfort. La civilisation de l'Oxus et les Indo-Iraniens et Indo-Aryens en Asie centrale. 2005, in: G. Fussman, J. Kellens, H.-P. Francfort, X. Tremblay, Aryas, Ariens et Iraniens en Asie centrale. p 302

O

• South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe.
  • Stephen Oppenheimer, The Real Eve, p. 152., quoted in Genetics and the aryan debate, Michel Danino (Published in Puratattva, Bulletin of the Indian Archaeological Society, New Delhi, No. 36, 2005-06, pp. 146-154.)

Quotes from academic articles

N

• Our data reveal a complex set of genetic sources that ultimately combined to form the ancestry of South Asians today. ... Our results show how ancestry from the Steppe genetically linked Europe and South Asia in the Bronze Age, and identifies the populations that almost certainly were responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across much of Eurasia.
  • V. M. Narasimhan; N. J. Patterson; P. Moorjani; I. Lazaridis; L. Mark, S. Mallick, et al., "The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia", bioRxiv (2018), Abstract

Y

• Genetic studies comparing present-day Australasians and Asians show that they likely derived from a single dispersal out of Africa, rapidly differentiating into three main lineages: one that persists partially in South Asia, one that is primarily found today in Australasia, and one that is widely represented across Siberia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia.
  • M. Yang, "A Genetic History of Migration, Diversification, and Admixture in Asia", Human Population Genetics and Genomics, vol. 2, no. 1 (2022), Abstract

• Genetic variation in contemporary South Asian populations follows a northwest to southeast decreasing cline of shared West Eurasian ancestry.
  • B. Yelmen; M. Mondal; D. Marnetto, et al., "Ancestry-Specific Analyses Reveal Differential Demographic Histories and Opposite Selective Pressures in Modern South Asian Populations", Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 36, no. 8 (August 2019), Abstract