India’s many distinct peoples spring from two ancient populations
Published on September 24th, 2009 | by Admin0
Nick Patterson of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues examined fragments of DNA from 25 groups across India. They included castes and hunter-gatherer tribes, or “scheduled populations”. Each of these groups was genetically distinct, but the profiling indicated that all Indians spring from one of two populations: Ancestral North Indians (ANI), who are genetically close to Europeans, and Ancestral South Indians, who are distinct from both east Asians and ANI (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08365).
“If you’re trying to understand disease and distribution between south and north India, there could be environmental or lifestyle issues,” says Patterson, “but genetics could also offer a perfectly possible explanation.”