Indian ancestry revealed

Nature News ^ | 23 Sep 2009 | Elie Dolgin

[Chickensoup]

I really can’t imagine who would think it was invented by the Brits.

Ignorant leftists.

[Battle Axe]

Higher than average levels of blood type B in India.

[muawiyah]

The article at that website says that it was published online 2002 December 11.

They also used MUSEUM SAMPLES (of questionable provinence I might add).

Article we are discussing is quite recent and is based on thousands of samples taken recently.

I think the old conclusions have been overturned.

BTW, the discovery that the San people are apparantly the source of the most ancient lineages for Europeans and Chinese (and everybody else outside of Africa) is NEW STUFF.

Nils Vander Post suggested as much 3/4 of a century ago.

[hellbender]

One website about the Andamans alleges that female images from Europe thought to be tens of thousands of years old, like the "Venus of Willendorf," show features like steatopygia and peppercorn hair, like Andamanese and Sanids, and suggests that the first populations "out of Africa" had those traits, and therefore that the Andamanese may be a relic of the oldest settlers of much of the world.

Their culture is extremely primitive, being hunting-gathering. They can't even make fire, but carry around something already burning (e.g. ignited by lightning strikes).

[hellbender]

The authors used museum samples in order to get around the fact that some modern Andamanese may have mixtures from non-indigenous groups, and that some of their tribes (like the Sentinelese) resist all direct contact with outsiders and would certainly not allow blood or other tissue to be sampled.

Genetic studies often seem to me to conflict with each other.

As to San being ancestral to us honkies, see my post about the Venus of Willendorf.

[muawiyah]

Can't tell you the reference at the moment but a couple of months ago I ran across a discussion of the "race" of the people who did the cave paintings in France. Turned out that you could estimate their height, and the relative proportions of their long bones to their torsos by making measurements of the distance from their handprints on the ceiling to the floor.

They still had tropical proportions but were roughly as tall as modern Negro people in Africa ~ and were clearly NOT white folk!

Remember, during the period of maximum glaciation in an ice age you have recurring periods of warmer weather where the ice may well melt allowing plants and animals to return.

Our early European ancestors supposedly walked into Europe about 35,000 years ago, just about when many of those cave paintings were being made. It is entirely possible that other people had gotten to Europe earlier, while the descendants of the San people in Africa (guys with the straight hair) simply arrived later.

[JimSEA]

I think you are correct. It would be hard to live as a Dalit or in a caste society generally.

[Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus]

self-ping

[hellbender]

The cave paintings I have seen pictures of are superb mostly realistic art. Nothing remotely comparable to them is being made by San or Andamanese hunter-gatherers.

[Yaelle]

Way back when I studied genetics in college, my genetics prof told us there were only two races that he knew of, those who couldn’t breed at sea level and those who couldn’t breed at high altitudes. The rest were just skeletal / appearance differences.

[x_plus_one]

ping

[muawiyah]

Of course not ~ you must first find a cave.....

[Rookie Cookie]

That sounds like a lot of hooey with a political agenda.

[hellbender]

It’s more than just the lack of caves. Bushmen, Andamanese, and other nomadic hunter-gatherers produce hardly any art above ground. They are stuck in the Paleolithic. Remember, these guys can’t even make fire!

[colorado tanker]

I read somewhere that the DNA evidence suggests the first modern humans out of Africa began working around the Indian Ocean coast, so that would fit with the Andaman Islanders, isolated from the continent, being among the oldest DNA types.

There appears to be a lot of work to be done on this subject. It's interesting that at one time in the distant past there was a lot of intermarriage, but that stopped with the advent of the caste system. So, what changed? Why didn't the invaders from the North start a caste system right away?

[Rookie Cookie]

If they had been “invaders”, the ASI (Indo-Europeans) would have wiped out the native ASI population (as was the case with European migration of north America) rather then allow large amounts of genetic flow between. Also they would have imposed their own Indo-European language and a rigid class/caste structure right away. Instead traces of Dravidian language family survives in places as far away as Iran and among Brahuis in north western Pakistan.

[Rookie Cookie]

Correction*: If they had been “invaders*”, the ANI* (Indo-Europeans) would have wiped out the native ASI population (as was the case with European migration of north America) rather then allow large amounts of genetic flow between. Also they would have imposed their own Indo-European language and a rigid class/caste structure right away. Instead traces of Dravidian language family survives in places as far away as Iran and among Brahuis in north western Pakistan.

[Rookie Cookie]

Caste is very much alive among Muslims and Christians in India. Its a social system not religious.

[Rookie Cookie]

Actually according to the study the Andamanese are close cousins of the Ancestral Southern Indians i.e they have a common ancestors. However Andamanes are NOT actually ASIs. They are used as proxies for the absence of pure Ancestral Southern Indians in today's mainland India.

[muawiyah]

Alas, the European migration to the Americas was not the cause of the destruction of the American Indians ~ rather, the hanta virus and a couple of other deadly diseases did the job.

The Europeans didn't even bring hanta virus with them ~ it was indigenous and is still a risk to everybody living in the Western hemisphere.

The primary reason Europeans purchased slaves from Africans was to REPOPULATE the agricultural regions in South and Central America as rapidly as possible to create wealth.

Those regions were not pristine jungle that'd never known the plough. Most of it had been good farmland and it was returned to that purpose through the hard work of African people who could resist the heat, humidity and to some degree the diseases (e.g. malaria).

BTW, that's just the most recent European migration. The people who became the Sa'ami and the Berbers in the old world were migrating to North America as early as 17,000 years ago when there were still vast Ice sheets over the continent and the ocean was hundreds of feet lower. They created the Clovis culture.

Now, in India, the Indo-European invaders arrived much earlier than is generally thought ~ and became part of the founding population, not just an add on. That's why it's so difficult to identify the Persian invaders of the Vedic period ~ they were simply the same folks as an earlier group.