In the comments on this weblog over the years I’ve learned a lot of interesting things about South Asian ethnography. One component which has been notable is the sense of ethnic pride of Punjabis, and in particular Jatts. Some of this is rather standard racism against other South Asians, especially South Indians and Bengalis in relation to whom they feel aesthetically superior. But other assertions of distinction are not so charged.

One of the aspects of Jatt identity seems to be the conception that they are descended from “Scythians,” what in a South Asian context would be termed Saka. When some Jatt commenters with whom I had amicable relationships with would bring this up I would gently mock them. My personal stance is that South Asians have an unhealthy obsession with presumed foreign origin, as if being South Asian is somehow shameful. This is very evident amongst Muslims for obvious reasons, insofar as Islam came to the subcontinent from West Asia. But I’ve encountered the same stance amongst Hindus. For example, Kashmiri Pandits explaining their peoples’ Persian origins.

But whatever the demerits of the excessive overall fixation on exogenous origin, I now believe that I wrongly dismissed out of hand the idea that Jatts in particular have some Scythian origin. The reason are a series of results coming out of the Harappa Ancestry Project. To be concise, it does seem that Jatts have a small but consistent proportion of northern Eurasian ancestry which sets them apart from other Punjabis. The most parsimonious explanation to my mind is that the Sakas did indeed have a genetic impact. This does not mean that I have a high confidence in this historical model. But I was clearly in the wrong in dismissing the Scythian origin myth out of hand. For that, I apologize. Also, please note that I am not claiming here that the preponderance of Jatt ancestry is Scythian. It is not. Rather, there may have been a Scythian overlay upon a typical Punjabi substrate.

If you are curious to learn more, please see the comments at the Harappa Ancestry Project. Continue reading →

We’re fast approaching the point where the “first genome” of class X is going to lose its novelty. There are more than 100 people who have had their full genome sequenced, and you can’t really track down a comprehensive list anymore that I can see. Remember, a full genome sequence is a mapping of all 3 billion DNA base pairs. In contrast, what genotyping services offer are a subset, often 1 million base pairs. The 1 million are not random, rather, they are variants which are known to…vary. But there are some important issues which can be addressed only in a full genome sequence. For example, you can see which distinct mutations are unique to you, and separate you from your parents.

In any case, here’s a summary in the Dawn: Continue reading →

Earlier this year I expressed excitement that the 1000 Genomes, “A Deep Catalog of Human Genetic Variation,” finally was going to add some more Indian populations. There was a sample of Gujaratis from Houston, but that’s a rather narrow slice of ~1 billion Indians, and nearly ~1.4 billion South Asians. The populations which were going to be added were Kayasthas from West Bengal, Marathas from Maharashtra, and Ahom from Assam.

Unfortunately, as I commented a few days ago that looks like it’s not happening. The Indian population collections have been removed from the website, and replaced by Sri Lankan Sinhalese and Tamils from the United Kingdom, and Bangladeshis. The Pakistani collection is already in process, as they’re getting the samples from Lahore. Continue reading →

I just recently heard that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was being made into a film. This perplexed me because I thought there was a film adaptation of that novel! Yes, there was, but that was a Swedish production, and the new film is “made in America.” Fair enough.

What does this have to do with this weblog? The actress who plays the protagonist in the Swedish film, Noomi Rapace, had a father who was a Gitano, a Spanish Romani (the term “Roma” is really an ethnonym for the eastern Romani). In case you don’t know, the Romani language is clearly Indo-Aryan. Its closeness to Indo-Aryan dialects of the Indian subcontinent is such that the story goes that Indian sailors who were stationed in Britain overheard, and understood, much of the conversation of local British Gypsies.

The origin of this population in the Indian subcontinent is evident through multiple lines of inquiry. Both in terms of culture, and genetics. Most of the genetic results focus on paternal and maternal lineages, but some “genome bloggers” have obtained samples from people with Roma background, and they clearly have distinctive South Asian ancestry. Because of intermarriage obviously this is not always visibly salient. How many people are aware that Charlie Chaplin was 1/4 Romanichal? Continue reading →

Since I began blogging here in February we’ve come a long way in getting a better sense of South Asian genetic relationships. By “we,” I’m referring mostly to Zack Ajmal of the Harappa Ancestry Project, and to a lesser extent the Dodecad Ancestry Project and the Eurogenes Genetic Ancestry Project. These explicitly amateur enterprises have taken off the shelf population genetic analytic tools, such as ADMIXTURE, and combined them with a “crowd-sourced” sampling strategy. Zack now as over 100 individuals, the vast majority of them South Asian, some from ethnicities and communities which have never been analyzed in the academic literature.

The Times of India has now taken an interest in the Harrapa Ancestry Project. I’m rather tickled by this. When I first began corresponding with Zack about the technical details of preforming this survey of South Asian genomics neither of us knew where we were going to go. The main issue we both felt needed to be addressed was of scope of sampling. In other words, there were simply too many under-sampled populations in South Asia when it came to academic analyses of the human genetics of the region.

A quick survey of a map of some participants in HAP shows that much of north-central India remains woefully under-sampled even after six months: Continue reading →