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

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

H

• The data provide no support for any model of massive migration and gene flow between the oases of Bactria and the Indus Valley. Rather, patterns of phenetic affinity best conform to a pattern of long-standing, but low-level bidirectional mutual exchange.
  • Hemphill, B. E., 1998, " Biological Affinities and Adaptations of Bronze Age Bactrians : HI. An Initial Craniometric Assessment ", American Journal of Physical Anthropoogy, 106, 329-348. -, 1999, " Biological Affinities and Adaptations of Bronze Age Bactrians : III. A Craniometric Investigation of Bactrian Origins ", American Journal of Physical Anthropoogy, 108, 173-192. Quoted in p. 302. 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

• As for the question of biological continuity within the Indus Valley, two discontinuities appear to exist. The first occurs between 6000 and 4500 BC [with another discontinuity] at some point after 800 BC but before 200 BC. In the intervening period, [the data] reveals clear indications of interaction with the West and specifically with the Iranian Plateau.
  • Hemphill, Brian E. "Biological adaptations and affinities of Bronze Age Harappans." Harappa Excavations 1986-1990: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Third Millennium Urbanism (Monographs in World Archaeology No. 3) (1991): 137-182. p 137, [1] quoted in The Aryan Debate, Thomas R. Trautmann Oxford University Press, 2005

K

• [The ancient Harappans] are not markedly different in their skeletal biology from the present-day inhabitants of Northwestern India and Pakistan... Of the Aryans, we must defer to literary and linguistic scholars in whose province lies the determination of the arrival and nature of the linguistic phenomenon we call the Aryans. . . . But archaeological evidence of Aryan-speaking peoples is questionable and the skeletal evidence is nil.
  • K. Kennedy (1984) "A Reassessment of the Theories of Racial Origins of the People of the Indus Valley Civilization from Recent Anthropological Data." In Studies in the Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology of South Asia (99-107). page 104. Ed. K. Kennedy and G. Possehl. Oxford: American Institute of Indian Studies. in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

• In short, there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the northwestern sector of the subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture... All prehistoric human remains recovered thus far from the Indian subcontinent are phenotypically identifiable as ancient South Asians... How could one recognize an Aryan, living or dead, when the biological criteria for Aryanness are non-existent?
  • K.A.R. Kennedy: “Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South Asia?”, in George Erdosy, ed.: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.49. On p.42, Kennedy quotes the suggestion that “not only the end of the [Harappan] cities but even their initial impetus may have been due to Indo-European speaking peoples”, by B. and F.R. Allchin: The Birth of Indian Civilization, Penguin 1968, p. 144. 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

W

• The anthropologists who have recently described the skeletons from Harappa remark that there, as at Lothal, the population would appear, on the available evidence, to have remained more or less stable to the present day.
  • Sir M. Wheeler: The Indus Civilization, Cambridge University Press 1968, p.72. Quoted in K.D. Sethna: The Problem of Aryan Origins, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi 1992 (1980), p.20. Also quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

Y

• 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