The past ten years has obviously been very active in the area of human genomics, but in the domain of South Asian genetic relationships in a world wide context it has seen veritable revolutions and counter-revolutions. The final outlines are still to be determined. In the mid-1990s the conventional wisdom was that South Asians were a branch of a broader West Eurasian cluster of peoples, albeit more distant from the core Middle Eastern-North-African-European-Caucasian clade. The older physical anthropological literature would have asserted that South Asians were predominantly Caucasoid, but with a Australoid element admixed in at varying proportions as a function of geography and caste. To put it more concretely, and I think accurately, a large degree of South Asian physical variety can be defined along the spectrum between A. R. Rahman and Nawaz Sharif. The regional and caste truisms are only correlations. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was a Tamil Brahmin, but experienced anti-black racism in the United States. I think that is reasonable in light of his appearance.
This rough & ready mainstream understanding, supporting by classical genetic markers, was overturned in the early years of the 21st century. One line of thought argued that South Asians were much more distinctive from the broader Western Eurasian cluster of peoples. Representative of this body of work is a paper like The genetic heritage of the earliest settlers persists both in Indian tribal and caste populations. These researchers tended to start with the female lineages, mtDNA, and then supplement that with Y lineages, the paternal descent. A separate line of evidence, generally drawn from Y chromosomal results, indicated that there were deep connections between the people of India and those of Central Eurasia, in particular via the R1a haplogroup. Additionally, one aspect of the first set of results which was very surprising was that it actually placed South Asians closer to East, not West, Eurasians. But by the end of the aughts the uniparental studies had been supplemented by a range of results produced from SNP-chips, which looked at hundreds of thousands of genetic variants. These studies seemed to support the older view of South Asians being closer to West Eurasians than East Eurasians. Finally last year a paper came out which posited that almost all South Asian populations were actually an ancient stabilized hybrid between two groups, a European-like population, “Ancient North Indians” (ANI), and another group which is no longer present in unadmixed form, “Ancient South Indians” (ASI), of whom the Andaman Islanders are distant relatives. Though there was a slight bias toward ANI as a whole, the fraction of ASI increased as one went southeast, and down the caste ladder. The distinctive “South Asian” ancestral group in other words then may actually be conceived of as a compound of these two elements; an admixture of the native substrate against a European-like genetic background.