by HARTOSH SINGH BAL
Film actor John Abraham’s religion bears no correlation to his genetics (Photo: SUBI SAMUEL)
Just where did our ancestors come from? Indian diversity has long been reduced by many historians to a simple story of an invasion of Aryans pushing Dravidians further south in the Subcontinent. But an analysis of the genes that Indians bear throws up enough evidence to rubbish that theory, pointing instead to a far more complex set of migrations—and perhaps reverse migrations—many millennia earlier than commonly supposed.
To get a clearer picture of our origins, Open sent DNA samples of a couple of celebrities, John Abraham and Baichung Bhutia, alongwith those of four magazine staffers to the National Geographic Deep Ancestry Project. Based on the genetic markers thus identified and other research conducted by scientists, we present a plausible map of our origins. Be prepared for some surprises
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‘The diversity of India is tremendous; it is obvious; it lies on the surface and anybody can see it. It concerns itself with certain mental habits and traits. There is little in common… between the Pathan of the North-West and the Tamil in the far South. Yet…there is no mistaking the impress of India on the Pathan, as this is obvious on the Tamil…The Pathan and the Tamil are two extreme examples; the others lie somewhere in between…It is fascinating to find how the Bengalis, the Marathas, the Gujaratis, the Tamils, the Andhras, the Oriyas, the Assamese, the Canarese, the Malayalis, the Sindhis, the Punjabis, the Pathans, the Kashmiris, the Rajput, and the great central block comprising the Hindustani-speaking people, have retained their peculiar characteristics…’
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MAKING SENSE OF THE MALE LINEAGE
The first male settlers of the Indian Subcontinent would have accompanied the women, whose descendants still inhabit the Subcontinent, on the first coastal migration from Africa. They are identified by the Haplogroup C marker, found in less than 5 per cent of the Indian population. According to the NGP, the presence of both John’s and Sharad’s haplogroups (H and L) in India can be explained by two separate migrations, one from the Middle East and the other from Central Asia, both dating back some 25,000 to 30,000 years ago.
The NGP goes on to describe the first encounter between the men from the original settlement of India with those who arrived later. The genetic trail, the NGP states, ‘provides some tantalizing clues as to what may have happened when members of the Indian Clan and the [earlier settled] Coastal Clan met. The [mitochondrial DNA] of people in this region preserves evidence of the early coastal dwellers in the female lineage, but Y-chromosome frequency for the Coastal Clan is very weak—around 5 per cent in southern India, and even less frequent going farther north. These data suggest that the descendants of the Indian Clan may have mated with the women of the earlier coastal population, but that the coastal men were killed, driven off, or otherwise prevented from reproducing.’
Pitchappan elaborates, “Probably initial colonies consisting of males and females settled and expanded. In the later migrations, either the males were by themselves or they came accompanied by very few females. Local males could have resisted and could have been exterminated, while females may have been amalgamated.” He adds that other possibilities are also conceivable, such as matrilineal societies by which the incoming males could have been amalgamated: “There is some evidence to suggest that settlements in the Dravidian belt were female centric.” He points to the existence of matriarchal societies in the South, such as Kerala’s Nairs, as the survival of an older tradition.
But stories such as this are speculative at best. In the Indian context, they are reminiscent of the possibilities once cited to describe the entry of Indo-Europeans into India, the so-called Aryan Invasion theory.
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