AsianScientist (May 22, 2017) – In a study modelling prehistoric population dynamics, researchers from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research have suggested that India was populated from the East. Their findings have been published in PLOS One.
The Indian subcontinent, currently populated by 1.2 billion people, is incredibly genetically diverse, spanning nearly 5,000 different ethnic groups. These different populations have historically been classified using linguistic features into four distinct groups, the Dravidian speaking groups in southern India, the Indo-European speaking groups in northern India, the Tibeto-Burman speaking groups in north-eastern India and the Austro-Asiatic speakers in central and eastern India.
In the present study, a team of researchers led by Professor Mayank N. Vahia has used a non-linguistic approach to trace the waves of human migration into India. Their model took the ability of the available land as a critical parameter determining if people would move, measuring both the availability and proximity of water and the flatness and altitude of the land based on geological data from satellite databases.
They then compared their simulation with archeological evidence of early humans in the Indian subcontinent and identified three possible locations in Kabul where the ancestors of North Indians could have entered India. They also identified Hyderabad as the possible location of the earliest ancestral South Indian population, and Goa and Orissa as two major break points in the mountain range that mark the Indian Subcontinent for people coming to India along the coast.
The researchers found that people entering from Goa would soon become indistinguishable from the original ancestral South Indian population. Therefore, they focused instead on entry from Orissa, finding that the groups merged in well localised geographical regions within the subcontinent.
The team also compared their simulation results with genetic data of the tribal population in the region. Since the groups are largely endogamous, they maintain their original genetic signal with very weak dilution due to intermixing. This allowed the researchers to identify the roots of different groups and show that the prediction was accurate.
Extending their simulation resulted in a pattern of population that agrees well with the present population of India, the researchers said.
The article can be found at: Vahia et al. (2017) A Diffusion Based Study of Population Dynamics: Prehistoric Migrations into South Asia.
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Source: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research; Photo: Pixabay.
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