Posted on 09/23/2009 5:45:59 PM PDT by BGHater
The mixing of two distinct lineages led to most modern-day Indians.
The population of India was founded on two ancient groups that are as genetically distinct from each other as they are from other Asians, according to the largest DNA survey of Indian heritage to date. Nowadays, however, most Indians are a genetic hotchpotch of both ancestries, despite the populous nation's highly stratified social structure.
"All Indians are pretty similar," says Chris Tyler-Smith, a genome researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the study. "The population subdivision has not had a dominating effect."
India makes up around one-sixth of the world's population, yet the South Asian country has been sorely under-represented in genome-wide studies of human genetic variation. The International HapMap Project, for example, includes populations with African, East Asian and European ancestry — but no Indians. The closest the Human Genome Diversity Cell Line Panel of 51 global populations comes is Pakistan, India's western neighbour. The Indian Genome Variation database was launched in 2003 to fill the gap, but so far the project has studied only 420 DNA-letter differences, called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), in 75 genes1. Caste divisions
Now, a team led by David Reich of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lalji Singh of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, has probed more than 560,000 SNPs across the genomes of 132 Indian individuals from 25 diverse ethnic and tribal groups dotted all over India.
The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.
The researchers also found that Indian populations were much more highly subdivided than European populations. But whereas European ancestry is mostly carved up by geography, Indian segregation was driven largely by caste. "There are populations that have lived in the same town and same village for thousands of years without exchanging genes," says Reich. Number puzzle
Indian populations, although currently huge in number, were also founded by relatively small bands of individuals, the study suggests. Overall, the picture that emerges is of ancient genetic mixture, says Reich, followed by fragmentation into small, isolated ethnic groups, which were then kept distinct for thousands of years because of limited intermarriage — a practice also known as endogamy.
This genetic evidence refutes the claim that the Indian caste structure was a modern invention of British colonialism, the authors say. "This idea that caste is thousands of years old is a big deal," says Nicole Boivin, an archaeologist who studies South Asian prehistory at the University of Oxford, UK. "To say that endogamy goes back so far, and that genetics shows it, is going to be controversial to many anthropologists." Boivin fears that the study might be 'spun' by politicians seeking to maintain caste structures in India, and she calls on social scientists and geneticists to collaborate on such "highly politicized" issues.
Beyond the study's social repercussions, the low rates of genetic mingling "could have important implications for biomedical studies of Indian populations", notes Sarah Tishkoff, a human geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who was not involved in the research. The partitioned population structure will need to be taken into account in any efforts to map disease genes, she says.
The small numbers of founders of each Indian group also have clinical consequences, says Reich. "There will be a lot of recessive diseases in India that will be different in each population and that can be searched for and mapped genetically," he says. "That will be important for health in India."
The evidence that most Indians are genetically alike, even though anthropological data show that Indian groups tend to marry within their own group, is "very puzzling", says Aravinda Chakravarti, a human molecular geneticist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who wrote an accompanying News & Views article3. For example, Chakravarti notes that the study can't establish a rough date for when the ancient mixing between the two ancestral populations took place. "There are very curious features of the data that are hard to explain," he says, adding: "This is not the end of the story."
* References
1. Indian Genome Variation Consortium J. Genet. 87, 3-20 (2008).
2. Reich, D. et al. Nature 461, 489-494 (2009).
3. Chakravarti, A. Nature 461, 487-488 (2009).
Moslem buddy of mine from Pakistan said "Don't let them fool you. Everyone still knows his own caste and history. You couldn't get married if you didn't."
Or, are we dealing with some other biological function that inhibits the reproduction of some haplogroups at that latitude.
Many of the others spoke languages with decidedly Dravidian and Uralic-Altaic connections (if not exactly roots). Indo-European languages arrived with outsiders long after post-glacial Europe had been completely resettled. Their languages come from an area of greater technological and agricultural prowess. Adopting those languages gave the European natives access to the intellectual background of the Indo-European societies.
That would included advanced bronze culture, then iron! Plus, they were already growing larger horses that could do real work and carry a mounted rider.
There's a very good case to make that the original Europeans came from Central Asia about 35,000 years ago during an interstadial (brief warm period) and then got trapped in the Western refugia for the next 20,000 years (this is on the French/Spanish border). The first folks out of the refugia were the Sa'ami who traveled East and North around the receding glacial lobe, and then West to America over the winter sea ice that then covered the North Atlantic.
The Europeans who went East from Central Asia became the Chinese, Jomon and other Far Eastern people.
The non-Europeans in the Middle-Eastern refugia became the Arabs, Hebrews, etc. The Europeans in the Mediterranean refugia became yet other people today variously identified as Southern Europeans.
Do not credit the Indo-Europeans, who were most likely as dark as the modern Persian upper-class, with being the first or original "white folks" in Europe.
Berbers are Indo-MiddleEasterns who moved to North Africa not North America. Their movement happened only a few thousand years ago not 17,000. Your fact are totally off the wall. Beside you are only muddying the water with unrelated topics.
My point was the genetic evidence run contrary to the “invasion” theory. It totally lacks all the tell tell signatures of an “invasion”. Invaders usually stamp out the native genetic lineage and language, both of which survives in the northern Indian mainland.
Beside a Christian from India will tell you precisely the same thing about their custom as your Muslim buddy.
Earlier, some folks left the refugia and went East and North to become the Sa'ami in Far Northern Europe. They are decidedly "white" and speak 11 distinctly NON INDO EUROPEAN languages.
This same crowd also had some who went South to North Africa ~ their peculiar marker genes appear among the Berber but not other North Africans. They were in North Africa at least 14,000 years ago for this to have happened.
American Indians in North America ALSO show the same peculiar marker genes and analysts suggest the first Sa'ami in North America had to have arrived about 17,000 years ago. There's archeological evidence for this in fact.
Your point carried with it erroneous and extraneous material ~ to wit, a claim that Indo-Europeans invaded North America and exterminated the natives ~ something we now know to be totally untrue.
Folks up on the research always know what's not true.
Regarding Indo-European invaders, that's been going on both ways for thousands of years ~ first one way, then another ~ but they were NOT native to Europe in any period 5,000 years or so earlier.
Ergo, "white people in Europe" were there earlier. In my experience your hardcore, closest to the original type Indo-Europeans are all doggone near black after a summer in the Sun. That didn't mean they couldn't pass on their language much as English is being passed on, and for the same reasons ~ in America today if you don't speak English you are doomed to a life of poverty and backwardness. Same with China. You want to get ahead, you learn English. And in AFrica? You learn English.
Ice Age people were not different from us in that regard. Each new advance came with a vocabulary and a way of talking about it that had to be learned to improve one's life.
Regarding genetic evidence running contrary to the "invasion" theory, it definitely indicates that the blood-lines undergirding the early Indo-Persian genetic identity were already present in India from the foundations ~ and that'd be back there 50,000 or more years ago.
The "other" non-Indo-Persian genetic identity was also present from the foundations, but where?
The last 10,000 years or so have resulted in a melding of the two lines ~ but with clusters of each so that we can tell they originallye existed.
This, by the way, is consistent with the way genes move ~ as quanta. They don't get "blended" ~ their counts get changed.
As for your commentary on Buddha's family being expelled. I dont know where you got that from. Seems to me you have mixed up a lot of myths and mumbo jumbo ideas into your constructs.
The Daimyo or "Great Family" owned everything, everybody and ruled everywhere until the late 1800s. That's a caste that included the original invaders of circa 560 AD, They've been recently identified as being pretty much the same thing as the Yakuts/Sakha now in Russia. They had earlier been in India and were known as the Sakha. Buddha was a Sakha. We know a lot about Buddha and his family (and tribe) and where they came from originally ~ to wit, somewhere near Yakutia ~ their ancient history has just recently been identified and translated.
The other caste is everybody else except the Eta. The Eta worked with animals, meat and leather.
Today these groups are all pretty mixed but you can still identify the Sakha if you know what to look for.
The warrior caste in Japan never really got off the drawing boards. Their great civil war that'd been raging for hundreds of years was stopped through the creation of the Samurai ~ mostly from the previous Emeshi ethnic group in the 1300s.
Many American Indian tribes had caste systems.
Now, whether or not it's very recent or very ancient, ALL caste systems are invariably based on the power of the top caste to enforce it's standards AND they all use ancient tradition, or a call to ancient tradition or scripture as an excuse to keep the system.
Today's caste systems in South Asia could very well date back to AD 1, but they had a predecessor that went back even further!
In fact, if you take a good look at where the Buddhists are in South Asia you will note that they are at the periphery of Greater India~!
There's a reason for that.
I think you are working a far shorter time-line than I am. My focal point for discussion is 35,000 years ago when the people who'd pushed up from Africa to Central Asia decided to move on East and West.
The periods of glaciation were far more frequent at that time than they are today in our present Interglacial. That made it possible for people to move all the way to the Tigris/Euphrates Valley, to North of the Mediterranean and West to the Pyranees, as well as move all the way to the Huang Ho and Yantze valleys.
They started out as one people ended up identified as the Europeans and the Chinese.
Other early populations stayed more to the South and had a different development history. One of the main bloodlines among the South Asian people stretches all the way to Anatolia and overlaps the Middle Eastern refugia, but during the period when the big ice ruled they were separated for thousands of years.
What you're talking about, the Indo-European movements, etc. are really recent and took place within the last 6,000 years or so.
There were people around living on the land long before that.
Good website so you can begin to brief yourself on this forgotten part of Indian history: http://www.cosmicelk.net/Yakutia16c.htm
There were no technologically advanced Indo-European society in Central Asia before Indus valley civilization. The most advanced would be the Mesopotamian which is again closer to Dravidian. Indo-Europeans were nomads not sedentary population which you need to build technologically advanced civilization.
The site you have linked actually says Shakas originated in South Asia. You claim they were East Asians who conquered India. Nowhere does it say Buddha’s family were expelled for India. You made that up. You claimed Buddha’s family was from Yakutia. The article you pointed me to says exactly the opposite i.e Yakutias originated from India. You have clearly been proven wrong by your own source.
So, why would these guys move around that way ~ go South, then North?
Well, it's the cyclic nature of the climate. We know they also moved away from Siberia into Korea and Japan into the 6th Century AD (CE). They did that in response to the Northern Hemispheric cataclysm that brought on the Dark Ages. It wasn't mongol invasions, or barbarians from the North did that ~ it was the climate. it affected the Far East, Central Asia and Europe. In fact, Europe was reduced to sub-third-world status for nearly a thousand years. China was on its way to recovery in 300 years. The Arabs in Mecca didn't know anything had happened until they found they could conquer 1/4 the known world in a few years.
The Dark Ages were very bad in the North, and the Sakha moved to Japan and took over.
If we go back in time to an event known as the Greek Dark Ages we see an opportunity for another climate disaster in the Far East about 1200 BC to 800 BC. Iceland's Mt. Hekla erupted in 950 BC and 1159 BC. A little earlier Santorini in the Mediterranean blew up in 1630 BC giving rise to a variety of climatic dislocations for several years.
Given that the Sakha appeared to have been able to navigate around the Eastern limb of the Himalayas with ease at various times, they could very well have done this many times over the centuries, skirting China proper (and their brutal regimes) and tripping on down to India any time they wished.
We can even go so far as to suggest Chinese emperors and earlier kings actually beefed up their wall system any time the Sakha were on the move, going North or going South.
Notice the article mentions something very important ~ the Sakha genetics show no sign of Mongolian marker sequences.
These guys are NOT Mongols ~ nor are the Chinese. On the other hand, the Sakha, and the Daimyo (to the degree any of them have been sampled in these studies) have Caucasion, Indian and "other" ancestry, as well as Chinese ancestry, and due to a more recent history in Japan, they have added Jomon ancestry (the Samurai being descendants of the original Jomon settlers there).
They've probably been moving North and South to and from their Siberian homeland for tens of thousands of years, ice permitting.
Worth noting, the Eskimos and American Indians ALSO derive substantially from this same group.
The Basques speak a language that's clearly at least 10,000 years old. The Irish speak a Celtic language imported from the Danube (which means the Spanish records are more reliable than the British records regarding the movements of that particular leadership elite).
So, yeah, the Basque languge is today an "isolate" but how'd their genes get spread all over Europe, particularly to Ireland?
The Galician (Spanish) record says the predecessors of the Irish elite came from the Danube through the Black Sea, through the Mediterranean to Galicia in Spain. From there they mounted an attack on Ireland and took over ~ taking with them, of course, their Basque servants (and slaves).
The areas we know which were subject to Basque culture were far more extensive than in modern times (you just dig up arrowheads and potshards). The area has been repeatedly invaded by Indo European speaking illegal aliens for centuries.
The Basque people adapted by moving or learning a new language. However, they appear to have been part of the original population that survived in the Western European Refugia during a period of peak Glaciation in Europe ~ which cut them off from everyone else.
Concerning who was or was not sedentary, the Indo-European speaking people were agriculturalists ~ not nomads. They had horses and iron.
Take a look at the book, “Eden in the East”
Again nowhere does it make any of the bogus claims you are making. You posts are pure nonsensical and totally your own fabricated cock and bull story not corroborated by any known source and are not worth a rebuttal. I wont waste anymore time.
It's been pretty well established for the last 50 years or so that when major volcanic events occur the Northern Hemisphere cools dramatically, and in less advanced times entire tribes would pull up stakes and move South or toward the ocean for survival.
Once conditions had improved they'd move back North or further inland.
It's happened repeatedly, and even in relatively recent times.
The Sakha/Yakuts clearly relocate, and the latest relocation was to waltz into Korea and Japan right there at the beginning of the Dark Ages when such a climate anomaly happened. With their superior technology they conqured both places easily and, in fact, imposed their language on both nations.
Take a look someday ~ check out how they classify Korean and Japanese. Kind of startling.
However, the Sakha/Yakuts are not Mongols ~ more correctly they are Chinese who have had adventures in India. They maintained their ethnic and genetic integrity in Japan for 1300 years. No doubt they were able to do that in India for a shorter period earlier.
On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that in Japan all the large breasted women who come by that condition naturally are descendants of the Daimyo, and not the Jomon or Yayoi (Nam Chinese).
This is something Indians wouldn't know anything about of course!
The Aryans did invade India, as their ancient tales say they did, but it was a mighty long time ago. There are nationalists in India who dispute this for various reasons. I don’t accept that they “would have wiped out the native ASI population”, but they brought their language with them, and the Indus Valley script, though it hasn’t been deciphered (no bilingual text has been found, perhaps none ever existed), has been shown to convey an agglutinative language, which Dravidian is, and Indo-European tongues are not.
The Indus Valley / Harappan culture was in the north, right where the Aryan migration into India from Central Asia occurred. Regardless of what people that civilization represents, it probably wasn’t Indo-European, and may not have left any discernable legacy (so far — if the script is cracked, perhaps some cultural spit-swapping will be revealed). The Aryans may not have been the agents of that civilization’s destruction (there’s some evidence that the cities were deserted except for the bodies of the dead and the Aryans rode on through).
Samuel Noah Cramer pointed out that the names used for most major cities and the mighty rivers of Mesopotamia were adopted by the Sumerians, but are not Sumerian names; the names appear to be from no known language, so apparently the Sumerians preserved just those few traces of some unidentified earlier people. It would be nice to see if the Harappans did the same thing, but for all we know the Indus Valley seals were part of an accounting system, and the lengthy documents were all on perishable media.
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