User:Rudrasharman/Notes/South Asia

Quotefarm

• Chaubey 2007

• Sahoo 2006 (+ repeat twice because someone wasn't paying attention)

=> "there is general agreement that Indian caste and tribal populations share a common late Pleistocene maternal ancestry in India"

=> "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. The perennial concept of people, language, and agriculture arriving to India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny. Recent claims for a linkage of haplogroups J2, L, R1a, and R2 with a contemporaneous origin for the majority of the Indian castes' paternal lineages from outside the subcontinent are rejected, although our findings do support a local origin of haplogroups F* and H. Of the others, only J2 indicates an unambiguous recent external contribution, from West Asia rather than Central Asia." (??italics??)

=> A 2006 genetic study by the National Institute of Biologicals in India, testing a sample of men from 32 tribal and 45 caste groups, concluded that the Indians have acquired very few genes from Indo-European speaking migrants.

=> Vijendra Kashyap, one of the authors of Sahoo et al. (2006), states that the people of the Indian subcontinent are indigenous to South Asia, but that Indo-European languages are not, and that language change resulted from the migration of numerically small superstrate groups that are difficult to trace genetically.

• Kivisild 2003a

• Kivisild 2003b

=> "Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene."

=> point out that, although northwest India was ruled for several centuries by dynasties descended from the armies of Alexander the Great, neither the M170 nor M35 genetic markers associated with Greeks and Macedonians has been found anywhere in India, and cautions that the shared prehistoric genetic inheritance of Indian tribal and caste populations "does not refute the existence of genetic footprints laid down by known historical events. This would include invasions by the Huns, Greeks, Kushans, Moghuls, Muslims, English, and others."

=> have revealed that a high frequency of haplogroup 3 (R1a1) occurs in about half of the male population of Northwestern India and is also frequent in Western Bengal. These results, together with the fact that haplogroup 3 is much less frequent in Iran and Anatolia than it is in India, indicates that haplogroup 3 found among high caste Telugus did not necessarily originate from Eastern Europeans. (?huh?)

=> "suggests that southern and western Asia might be the source of this haplogroup".

• Bamshad 2001

=> "For maternally inherited mtDNA, each caste is most similar to Asians. However, 20%-30% of Indian mtDNA haplotypes belong to West Eurasian haplogroups, and the frequency of these haplotypes is proportional to caste rank, the highest frequency of West Eurasian haplotypes being found in the upper castes. In contrast, for paternally inherited Y-chromosome variation each caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians. Moreover, the affinity to Europeans is proportionate to caste rank, the upper castes being most similar to Europeans, particularly East Europeans. [...] Analysis of these data demonstrated that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians, and the upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are the lower castes. Collectively, all five datasets show a trend toward upper castes being more similar to Europeans, whereas lower castes are more similar to Asians."

• Kennedy (Erdosy 1995)

=> states that discontinuities in the prehistoric skeletal record occur either too early or too late to fit the classic scenario of a mid-second millennium B.C. Aryan invasion, but that this does not preclude "a gradual infiltration of foreigners".

• Witzel (Erdosy 1995)

=> states that 'their genetic impact would have been negligible and, as was the case with the Normans in England, would have been "lost" in a few generations in the much larger gene pool of the Indus people.'

• Cavalli-Sforza 2000

=> states that "Archeology can verify the occurrence of migration only in exceptional cases" and identifies the introduction of Indo-European languages to India as an instance of language replacement, when the language of a population changes accompanied by only modest genetic effects.

• NGS Genographic project

=> states that M17 arose "in the region of present-day Ukraine or southern Russia.".

• Wells 2002

=> states that "The Aryans came from outside India. We actually have genetic evidence for that. Very clear genetic evidence from a marker that arose on the southern steppes of Russia and the Ukraine around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. And it subsequently spread to the east and south through Central Asia reaching India." M17 "shows that there was a massive genetic influx into India from the steppes within the past 10,000 years" and "Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people – not merely their language – from the steppe appears to be true."

• Mukherjee 2001

=> Studies of Indian scholars showed the R1a lineage forms around 35–45% among all the castes in North Indian population (Namita Mukherjee et al. 2001) and the high frequency of R1a1 present in the indigenous Chenchu and Badaga tribal Adivasis of south India making the association with the Brahmin caste more vague. However, a model involving population flow from Southern Asia into Central Asia during Paleolithic interglacial periods with a subsequent R1a1-mediated Neolithic migration of Indo-European-speaking pastoralists back into Southern Asia would also be consistent with these data (?jumble?)

• Saha 2005 (<- bogus, no ref, could be some idiot's notion of Sahoo 2006)

• Sengupta 2006

=> have confirmed R1a's diverse presence including even Indian tribal and lower castes (the so-called untouchables) and populations not part of the caste system. From the diversity and distinctiveness of microsatellite Y-STR variation they conclude that there must have been an independent R1a1 population in India dating back to a much earlier expansion than the Indo-Aryan migration. The pattern of clustering does not support the model that the primary source of the R1a1-M17 chromosomes in India was a single entry of Indo-European speaking pastoralists from Central Asia. However, the data are not necessarily inconsistent with more complicated demographic scenarios involving multiple entries in both Paleolithic and Neolithic periods and two-way population flows into and out of South Asia. The absence of haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA) in Indo-Aryan and Dravidian populations which is found in all other Indo-European populations, in especially large proportions in western Europe, may suggest significant levels of native genetic base for the Indo-Aryan peoples compared to other Indo-European peoples. However, it must be noted that R1b, with few exceptions, is also not present in significant levels in Central Asian populations. Also, the high prevalence of haplogroup R1a1 relative to other Indian populations (including Indo-Aryans) in the northwestern portion of the subcontinent (northwestern India and present-day Pakistan) also suggests an affinity between this part of the subcontinent and the Central Asian steppes, perhaps brought about by longstanding two-way population flows. (?bafflegab?)

• Sharma 2005

• Human Genome Diversity project

• Reich 2009

=> In a 2009 study of 132 individuals, 560,000 SNPs in 25 different Indian groups were analyzed, providing strong evidence in support of the notion that modern Indians form a population that is hybrid, yet highly substructured by caste, language family and region, descending from two ancient, genetically divergent populations, termed ancestral North Indian (ANI) and ancestral South Indian (ASI), one of which (ANI) resembled the modern Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans, while the other's (ASI) closest modern match are the indigenous Andaman Islanders. According to the study, the former type of ancestry ranges from 39–71% in most Indian groups, and is generally more prevalent in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European-speaking groups.

• Rosenberg 2006

=> Clustering analysis from Rosenberg (2006), shows no distinctive genetic cluster compositions among Indo-Aryan populations in India, though there is a slight change in the specific Indo-Aryan populations of the Punjab, Sindh and Kashmir regions located in the north-west of South Asia.

Reorg

The studies published in this active field present a mixed picture.

To one side are reports that emphasize the finding that tribal and caste populations in South Asia derive largely from a common genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians, with only limited gene flow from external regions since the start of the Holocene. India-specific mtDNA haplogroups, in particular, show coalescence times of 40-60 kya, while J2 from West Asia is identified as the only non-native Y-DNA haplogroup present in significant proportions. The Y-DNA Haplogroup R1a1a (M17), which was thought to be a marker of Indo-European speaking peoples, has been found quite prevalent in South Asia, including tribal groups, suggesting a native origin with a time depth greater than any supposed Indo-Aryan migration.

To the other side are reports that stratify the population, finding relatively closer affinity to Western Eurasians than to Asians among upper castes compared to lower and in men compared to women. Evidence has also been found that the deep ancestry of the Indian population is a hybrid of two distinct founder groups, one genetically closer to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans, and the other closer to East and Southeast Asians; whose relative proportions vary with the former type more prevalent in high-caste and Indo-Aryan speaking groups.

Language change resulting from the migration of numerically small superstrate groups would be difficult to trace genetically. Historically attested events, such as invasions by Huns, Greeks, Kushans, Moghuls, Muslims, and modern Europeans, have had negligible genetic impact. Despite centuries of Greek rule in Northwest India, for example, no trace of either the M170 or the M35 genetic markers associated with Greeks and Macedonians have been found.