Talk:Toomas Kivisild

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• ...whether any of these can be singled out as more autochthonous than others. However ... this would be highly problematic, first, because the language families involved are generally believed to be far younger than the time frame required for the peopling of India. Secondly, such autochthonous Indian-specific mtDNA and Y chromosome lineage groups are widely spread across language borders in the subcontinent ... and the putative language shifts make it hard to infer the original tongue for every population studied even during the historic period and perhaps impossible for earlier times. Thus, the 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. (Chaubey et al. 2007: 97)...Most of the Indian-specific mtDNA haplogroups show coalescent times 40,000-60,000 YBP. (Chaubey et al. 2007: 97)
  • 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
  • Chaubey, Gyaneshwer, Mait Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild & Richard Villems. 2007. Peopling of South Asia: Investigating the CasteñTribe Continuum in India. Bio Essays 29: 91-100.

• ...a rapid dispersal of modern humans from eastern Africa and subsequent settlement of South Asia. A single exodus along a southern, possibly coastal, route is a parsimonious conclusion to draw from contemporary patterns of haploid genetic distribution and diversity. ... The population movements of the Holocene, together with the appearance of West Eurasian mtDNA lineages in the period 40ñ20 ka, indicate that South Asia has indeed been at the crossroads for much of modern human prehistory, but that the autochthonous elements of its genetic heritage have not been dominated by these later comings and goings. (Endicott et al. 2007: 240)...
  The Austro‐Asiatic and Tibeto‐Burman language groups may retain a distinctive genetic signature due to their relatively recent introduction and limited subsequent male gene flow. However, consistent divisions between populations speaking Dravidian and Indo‐Aryan languages are harder to define with reliability. The complex and intertwined history of changes in language, subsistence patterns, demography and political intervention, makes it difficult to relate genetic patterns to these widespread linguistic categories. The evidence from mtDNA argues against any strong differentiation between these (and other) major language groups …, and therefore nullifies attempts to trace, maternally, the large‐scale population movements once speculated to have accompanied the arrival of Indo‐Aryan languages. (Endicott et al., 2007: 238)... will continue to emphasize the genetically complex patterns present, and are increasingly unlikely to support reductionist explanations of simplistic demographic and cultural scenarios. Rather, they should put weight behind the suggestion that West and South Asia, as conduits for the settlement of the rest of the world, are central to comprehending modern human evolution outside of Africa. (Endicott et al., 2007: 240)
  • 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 hap- loid 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

• “Language families present today in India, such as Indo-European, Dravidic and Austro-Asiatic, are all much younger than the majority of indigenous mtDNA lineages found among their present-day speakers at high frequencies. It would make it highly speculative to infer, from the extant mtDNA pools of their speakers, whether one of the listed above linguistically defined group in India should be considered more ‘autochthonous’ than any other in respect of its presence in the subcontinent.” ...
  The coalescence ages of the Indian- and Iranian- specific U7 clades suggest that the time-window of this continuum was closed by ca. 20,000 ybp. (Metspalu et al. 2004)
  • Metspalu M, Kivisild T, Metspalu E, Parik J, Hudjashov G, … Villems R. 2004. Most of the extant mtDNA boundaries in South and Southwest Asia were likely shaped during the initial settlement of Eurasia by anatomically modern humans. BMC Genetics 5(1): 26.
  • 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.)
  • 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

• Indian populations are characterized by two major ancestry components, one of which is spread at comparable frequency and haplotype diversity in populations of South and West Asia and the Caucasus. The second component is more restricted to South Asia and accounts for more than 50% of the ancestry in Indian populationsî (Metspalu et al. 2011: 731). But the first component, shared with regions west of India, ìcannot be explained by recent gene flow, such as the hypothetical Indo-Aryan migrationî (Metspalu et al. 2011: 740). The evidence, instead, suggests multiple gene flows to the South Asian gene pool, both from the west and east, over a much longer time span (Metspalu et al. 2011: 741). The authors also offered a welcome reminder of the complexity of genetic origins in the Indian context: Several aspects of the nature of continuity and discontinuity of the genetic landscape of South Asia and West Eurasia still elude our understanding. Whereas the maternal gene pool of South Asia is dominated by autochthonous lineages, Y chromosome variants of the R1a clade are spread from India (ca 50%) to eastern Europe and their precise origin in space or time is still not well understood (Metspalu et al. 2011: 739).
  • 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
  • Metspalu Mait, Irene Gallego Romero, Bayazit Yunusbayev, Gyaneshwer Chaubey, Chandana Basu Mallick, Georgi Hudjashov, Mari Nelis, Reedik M‰gi, Ene Metspalu, Maido Remm, Ramasamy Pitchappan, Lalji Singh, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Richard Villems & Toomas Kivisild. 2011. Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia. The American Journal of Human Genetics. December 9, 89: 731-44.

• Oppenheimer, a leading advocate of this scenario, summarizes it in these words: “For me and for Toomas Kivisild, 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., 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.)

• “The influence of Central Asia on the pre-existing gene pool was minor. ... There is no evidence whatsoever to conclude that Central Asia has been necessarily the recent donor and not the receptor of the R1a lineages.” This is also highly suggestive (the R1a lineages being a different way to denote the haplogroup M17). ...add to exitsting.. Another Indian biologist, Sanghamitra Sahoo, headed eleven colleagues, including T. Kivisild and V. K. Kashyap, for a study of the Y-DNA of 936 samples covering 77 Indian populations, 32 of them tribes.18 The authors left no room for doubt: “The sharing of some Y-chromosomal haplogroups between Indian and Central Asian populations is most parsimoniously explained by a deep, common ancestry between the two regions, with diffusion of some Indian- specific lineages northward.”...“The Y-chromosomal data consistently suggest a largely South Asian origin for Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo-Aryan language family.”
  • Sanghamitra Sahoo, Anamika Singh, G. Himabindu, Jheelam Banerjee, T. Sitalaximi, Sonali Gaikwad, R. Trivedi, Phillip Endicott, Toomas Kivisild, Mait Metspalu, Richard Villems, & V. K. Kashyap, “A prehistory of Indian Y chromosomes: Evaluating demic diffusion scenarios,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 January 2006, vol. 103, No. 4, pp. 843–848. (Italics in one of the quotations are mine.)
  • 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.)

• A more recent study (Sahoo ... Endicot, Kivisild... Kashyap 2006) concludes: “The Y- chromosomal data consistently suggest a largely South Asian origin of Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from regions north and west of India” (p 843); then again: “It is not necessary, based on the current evidence, to look beyond South Asia for the origins of the paternal heritage of the majority of Indians at the time of the onset of settled agriculture. ... our findings do support a local origin of haplogroups F* and H” (p 847)
  • Sahoo S., Singh A., Kivisild T... et al 2006 ‘A Prehistory of Indian Y-chromosomes’ in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) vol 103, no 4, 843-8.Quoted from Kazanas, N. (2009). Indo-Aryan origins and other Vedic issues. Chapter 9

• In 2010 Underhill was the lead author of a study that examined the relationship between European and Asian Y chromosomes within the same haplogroup R1a, which, for our purpose, is the same as M17 and has been regarded as a marker of the supposed Indo‐ European migrations; the authors found that coalescent time estimates of R1a1a correlate with the timing of the recession of the Last Glacial Maximum and predate the upper bound of the age estimate of the Indo‐European language tree … The presence and overall frequency of haplogroup R1a does not distinguish Indo‐Iranian, Finno‐Ugric, Dravidian or Turkic speakers from each other. (Underhill et al., 2010: 483) Moreover, the distribution of sub‐haplogroups of R1a “would exclude any significant patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, at least since the mid‐Holocene period” (Underhill et al., 2010: 483).
  • 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
  • Underhill PA, Myres NM, Rootsi S, Metspalu M, Zhivotovsky LA, … Kivisild T. 2010. Separating the post‐glacial coancestry of European and Asian Y chromosomes within haplogroup R1a. European Journal of Human Genetics 18(4): 479–484.

• there is a “lack of clear distinction between Indian castes and tribes,”
  • T. Kivisild, S. Rootsi, M. Metspalu, S. Mastana, K. Kaldma, J. Parik, E. Metspalu, M. Adojaan, H.-V. Tolk, V. Stepanov, M. Gölge, E. Usanga, S. S. Papiha, C. Cinnioglu, R. King, L. Cavalli-Sforza, P. A. Underhill & R. Villems, “The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72(2):313-32, 2003.
  • 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.)