I mentioned a few days ago that a friend was trying to get together some data to analyze the genetic variation of South Asians. By a strange coincidence Dienekes just published a more detailed analysis of South Asians…and uncovered something very interesting, though not that surprising. Some technical preliminaries:
A note of caution: The reduced marker set (~30k) means that a lot of noise is added in the admixture estimates. In particular, many individuals are likely to get low-level admixture from population sources that can be attributed to noise. But, as we will see, the small marker set does not really affect either the power of the GALORE approach, or of ADMIXTURE to infer meaningful clusters.
In addition to the various online sources of public data Dienekes got about a dozen South Asians. I was one of those South Asians, DOD075. In many ways I’m a rather standard issue South Asian, similar to Gujaratis, except that I have a substantial ‘East Asian’ component. More concretely, between 1/6 and 1/7 of my ancestry seems to be of eastern origin, far higher than the norm among South Asians. The rest of my ancestry was mostly South Asian specific, with a minor, but significant ‘West Asian’ component common across northern India.
Rerunning with more data with different samples Dienekes came out with a different set of ancestral components. Of particular interest to me he broke down the East Asian between East Asian proper and Southeast Asian. Below are a selection of populations with ancestral components + me. I’ve also renamed a few components. North Kannadi = Dravidian and Irula = Indian tribal. Indian = Generic Indian. Looking at the Fst it seems that Indian endogamy and population bottlenecks has had an effect…look at the North Kannadi distance from everyone else.
The following passage is from the epilogue of The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey Out of Africa by Stephen Oppenheimer:
In this book I have offered a synthesis of genetic and other evidence. Everything points to a single southern exodus from Eritrea to the Yemen, and to all the non-African male and female gene lines having arisen from their respective single out-of-Africa founder lines in South Asian (or at least near the southern exit). I regard the genetic logic for this synthesis as a solid foundation, and I have based the rest of my reconstruction of the human diaspora upon it. Obviously, the ‘choice’ of starting point (mine or theirs) determined all the subsequent routes our ancestors and cousins took. Tracing the onward trails is only possible as a result of marked specificity in regional distribution of the genetic branches The geographic clarity of both male and female gene trees is a big departure from the fuzzy inter-regional picture shown by older genetic studies. The degree of segregation of lines into different countries and continents is in itself good evidence that once they got to their chosen new homes, the pioneers generally stayed put, at least until the Last Glacial maximum forced some of them to move. This conservative aspect of our genetic prehistory also provides a partial explanation for the fact that when we look at a person, we can usually tell, to the continent, where their immediate ancestors came from, and underlies differences that some of us still call ‘race.’
Oppenheimer wrote the above in the early aughts, as his book was published in 2003. Much of this is generally in line with the ‘orthodoxy’ of the day. I believe that Oppenheimer’s assertion that there was one southern migration out of Africa by anatomically modern humans has gained some advantage over the alternative model of two routes, northern and southern, over the past ten years (Spencer Wells’ The Journey of Man sketches out the two wave model). Other assertions and assumptions have not stood the test of time. In particular, I would contend that generally the ‘conservative aspect of our genetic prehistory’ can no longer be taken for granted. Specifically, it seems likely now that much occurred after the Ice Age and during the Neolithic.