Tag: Genetics

What ails Indian Sports?

Another leap year brings another bucket full of disappointments. Its not enough that we have 365 days of suffering that every four years we must have an extra day of distress. Just like democracy where people suddenly realize the rampant corruption, the inequalities of society & the downright poor performances of the sitting government 2 weeks before the election even though they didn’t give two hoots about it for 300+ weeks, the Indian public suddenly awakens to realize we cannot produce consistent medal winners in the Olympics.

People who don’t know what a balance beam is instantly become the judges who gave Nadia Comaneci the perfect 10 and talk as though they personally taped Kerri Strug’s ankle and made her win on one leg. Instead of looking at the root cause of the failure the tendency is to just blame and find a scapegoat. The lowest hanging fruit in our case being: Cricket. These folks completely ignore that fact that ever since India, in one of the biggest upsets ever, won the world cup in 1983 we have been one of the most consistent teams in the tournament of the once-every-four-years kind. Our win/loss ratio is 2nd only to powerhouses Australia.

The Indian hockey federation resisted shifting to astroturf till the 90s and kept crying conspiracy while Pakistan went ahead with the changes and were exceptionally successful till the mid-90s. Whilst our national hockey federation was crying & sobbing conspiracy theories, the Indian cricket team went ahead with its business and went on to enjoy some of its greatest successes in the decade of 2000-10.

Not to mention there are enough single sports mad nations that produce consistent winners in major Olympic disciplines. Brazil are as mad about football as India is about cricket but that hasn’t stopped Brazil from producing one of the best volleyball teams, possibly the best ever F1 race car driver and very good basketball players who play for the best NBA teams.

Politicians & Businessmen in Sports are Goooooood!

There is a tendency in India to not trust politicians and businessmen and if politicians & businessmen come together it is apocalypse now. The reason Indian athletes’ struggles at the summit is heavily attributed to politicians running various Indian sports bodies. This has no real basis in truth. BCCI is run by politicians & private businessmen.

M A Chidambaram, M Chinnaswamy, Mamen were tycoons who have done great things for cricket purely out of interest. BCCI’s ascent was powered by NKP Salve the savvy Marathi politician. He brought the world cup to India and the first world cup outside England was a rousing success. BCCI went from strength to strength and once Jagmohan Dalmiya, another businessman, took over, BCCI signed massive TV contracts and filled its coffers with so much money that it made Scrooge McDuck look like a street beggar.

Now wiseguys will ask “Ha what about other sports they are also headed by politicians and why don’t they succeed?”. The difference between BCCI & other bodies is that BCCI is private and most of the other sporting bodies are Soviet-style government bodies and are run by the devastating machinery that is the Government Bureaucracy. There’s a high chance that a politician will do good. It is in their self-interest to do so but it is not so for the bureaucrat.

Genetics

Believe it or not genetics play a heavy role in sporting ability and the Indian race is not blessed with best of the athletic genes. The most profound example of this is the 100m race. There are exactly 4 men who have broken the 10 second barrier that are not of West African descent. The standard argument against this line of thought is that how come Chinese are able to win so many medals. The Chinese win most of the medals in gymnastics and diving viz basically gymnastics in a pool. Historically, Chinese have had many opera houses which are excellent training stages for acrobats and martial arts. Many Kung Fu action stars like Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, Jet Li etc who are all acrobatically athletic are products of these schools. The Chinese communist government tapped into this reservoir and used modern western methods to create a powerful tour de force.

Lack of Sporting culture

India lacks a sports culture. In the west kids play all sorts of organized sports regularly. Though things are slowly changing in India, we aren’t getting there quickly enough. Academics still dominate because its the easiest and, despite rising education costs, the cheapest and highest hit ratio of success.

Many people casually say kids are forced by parents to study and unless that changes India will never win medals. This is a half-arsed argument which is made mostly by unmarried childless folks. The reality is that sports is a very expensive venture with an extremely short shelf life (average 3-4 years) and less than 1% of the competitors make it to the top to make a sustainable living and those who don’t make it will have wasted at least half a decade away from general white collar jobs that are on offer. It is already a merciless competition through sheer quantity if not quality and with a 5-6 year handicap it gets even harder to find employment.

Despite the TV shows & advertisements repeatedly showing an aspiring upper middle class, India still is largely a lower middle class blue collar country. Our families just cannot cope with losing the young & strong next generation to failure and depression through the hit & miss world of sports instead of increasing the quality of their lives through the surer path of academics.

Sports as a political tool sans Cricket

The world evolved into USA vs USSR a few years after world war II and the Olympics became a giant pissing contest between the two powers. There were the two giant boycotts of 1980 & 1984 where many athletes who wasted 4 priceless years of their lives just because the politicians of the nations wanted to score brownie points.

India are no strangers to the political boycott. The Indira Gandhi led govt refused to let the Indian tennis team to play the Davis Cup final vs Apartheid South Africa in 1974. This was an anomaly though. India has always failed to see beyond cricket to see sports as a political tool. The Chinese used Beijing 2008 to show how far they have come as a nation. Today they are dominant in almost every field. Every achievement in sport is seen as showing China as a superior powerful nation.

India hardly use their (few) successes to score PR victories. This is not limited to sports. India fail to use our successes to score PR in any field. The Silicon Valley would not be a cradle of innovation had it not been for Indian engineers. Isn’t Sundar Pichai’s Google CEO analogous to an Indian tennis player winning the Wimbledon singles’ title? Not only do we not praise but we actively disown these great success stories. With this sort of inferiority complex we can never aspire to achieve greatness not only in sport but any field.

Indians & Skill-based sports

As mentioned earlier, India are genetically unsuited less suited for purely athleticism based sports like sprinting, long distance running, swimming, diving, gymnastics etc. It is highly unlikely India will produce a sub-10 second 100m runner in 10-15 years from today. Having said that India have had no problems in acquiring proficiency in skill based sports. Despite general apathy, lack of proper infrastructure & most of the players not even seeing an astroturf field until their late teens, India still produces highly skilled hockey players at international level.

Netherlands, a country which is about as big as Haryana, has about 300 astroturf hockey stadia. India, the most successful nation ever, has just 30 astroturf stadia. Even a simple doubling of this number & giving U-16, U-12 teams access to these facilities will see instant uptick in results thanks to the greater repetitions from an earlier age.

Even in racket based sports like tennis & badminton, India produced top class players like Ramanathan Krishnan, Vijay Amritraj, Leander Paes, Prakash Padukone, Pullela Gopichand all of whom were top players in their disciplines. Almost all of their formative years were in the debilitating uber-socialist era of Indian bureaucracy.

Don’t Put all your eggs in one basket(s)

India has decent talent pool in a few sports and we must identify how our traditional sports can be used to translate those talents into their nearest equivalent of Olympic sports. Traditional Indian martial arts still exist in various forms. We must study how these traditional skills, that are second nature to the practitioners, can be translated to Olympic sports like fencing and judo. It is even possible to tap gymnasts from these village grounds given the amount of acrobatics that is required for a skilled fighter.

We have had centres of wrestling colloquially for centuries. Remember that India’s first individual medal came in wrestling as early as 1952. Funding for wrestling must be increased multi-fold to create a much bigger pool of wrestlers to compete at the Olympics & world championships. Again our traditional style of wrestling must be codified and combined with modern diet & fitness techniques to get the best of both worlds. Tradition, more often than not, exists for a reason because it works!

Shooting is another sport India must focus upon. The Indian army is one of the best trained armies in the world and we have a wealthy pool of talent to chose from to train. It is important to identify the men who had the best shooting records and the training provided to these men can lead to a high degree of sophistication in Olympic competitions.

If India, through means private & public, concentrate on these sports i.e. archery(4), fencing(10), judo(14), wrestling(18) & shooting(15), we will compete for 159 total medals. With a thorough road map and exact targets at each step, even if India win 10% of the medals we will end up with 16 medals in an Olympics. We should also invite experts from countries that dominate medals in said sports i.e. Japanese Judo experts or South Korean archery experts to train our fledgling aspiring Olympians.

Most Important factor of them all: Money

Now comes the most important resource of them all: money. We must spare no expense for the training & dietary regimes for these athletes. Medical support is just as important. These athletes, especially the wrestlers & racket sportspeople, push themselves beyond the edge of what is humanly possible. It is inevitable that the occasional bend becomes a break. Proper surgery and rehab is not cheap. It is a very expensive affair but it is also most necessary.

The value of a medal or a trophy is priceless. The Olympic prize money is a pittance compared to amount of time and effort that an Olympian puts in. There was news a few days back that Brazil had spent $14 billion for the world cup they hosted 2 years ago. Had they won their 6th world cup in Maracana the said $14 billion would have been worth less than a torn rag when compared to the priceless trophy that Thiago Silva would have lifted in front of their home crowd.

Lastly, we must draw inspiration from whatever semi-success we had in the past and aim to better it. Dipa Karmakar is an inspiration to all gymnastic aspirants in India. She overcame injury, lack of facilities and official apathy to just qualify for the vault final. She was not even allowed to take a personal physio, a bare necessity that is taken for granted by the top nations, with her before the final jump. She overcame impossible odds to miss out on a bronze medal by a hair’s breadth. If she had even half the resources available to Simone Biles how well would she have done?

This is an abridged version of a 3 part post on whitericevellasamy.wordpress.com. Parts i, ii, iii.

August 17, 2016
Aryan Invasion Theory: Genetics revisited

This is a follow-up article on our previous article which presented recent genetic evidence to refute AIT. We will point out common misconceptions prevalent on the internet which stem from the fact that either AIT enthusiasts wilfully ignore new evidence or cherry-pick a few studies that suit their narrative.

This is a recent but long-winding article by MT which mixes various evidences. It makes sense to stick to genetic studies as according to the same author, archaeology does not matter for studying population migrations — “pots don’t speak”. For now we will also stay clear of linguistic arguments as they can almost always be made either way in favour of AIT or OIT. For those who wish to read more on linguistic arguments in favour of OIT, one can follow the research work of Srikanth Talageri.

For those who find it difficult to go through this entire blog post, one can directly jump to the bibliography section at the end to understand that most of the quoted research material is old and in some cases patently wrong for explaining the genetic movement of populations. In all the cases, MT uses genetic studies which show that there is similarity between Indians and Europeans, but none of those studies put a timeline on the connection. This has unfortunately become a favourite tactic of AIT enthusiasts — to use half-baked scientific truths to peddle their outdated fiction based on old genetic studies. This whole AIT defence was built on the assumption that migration happened only from the Caucasus to India and not from India to the Caucasus. Unfortunately, recent genetic studies are poking many holes in this theory.

The old genetic studies were limited by the resources available and could tell about shared ancestry but could not put a timeline on the direction of migration. The newer genetic studies, however, can answer both. In fact, the latest genetic studies published took full cognisance of the proposed Aryan migration into India from Russia as well as OIT. But after analysing the genetics comprehensively with larger, wider and deeper samples across all populations, the most recent genetic study came to the conclusion that the Punjabi R1a1a Y haplotype is the oldest among the Indo-European population and is likely the origin of the Indo-Europeans. The timeline of the genetics of the population is given by the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) of the R1a1a alleles. Out of all the population groups studied from all over the world, Punjab showed the highest frequency of SNP variations — and hence is likely the oldest population group among those studied — with the frequency of variation decreasing from Punjab towards Western European population, with the lowest frequency of variations in the westernmost and northernmost Europeans. This clearly indicates that the Caucasus is not the origin of Indo-Europeans as the AIT fanboys want to believe.

Also notice that the above studies explain why North Indian populations have so much more in common with Europeans than South Indian populations — it was the North Indian population which migrated towards Europe. Also notice that North Indian population is composed of 60% ANI and 40% ASI, while South Indian population is 60% ASI and 40% ANI. This mixing creates some confusion, and AIT proponents usually use it to claim that ANI represents Aryans. But this is not true. ANI migrated into India around 45,000 years BC and ASI around 60,000 BC — and ANI and ASI are not synonymous with Aryans and Dravidians as AIT proponents want you to believe.

And this mixture would have happened before the IVC came into existence because IVC came to existence after 4000 BC — and genetics point out that no new gene flow came into India after 12,000 BC. The study by Lucotte G. points out the same fact: the Indo-European population (by virtue of frequency of variations in R1a1 SNP) is 15,000 years old in the Punjab plains, 11,000 years old in Central Asia, 11,000 years old in the Caucasus, 7,000 years old in Scandinavia and Western Europe. So all in all, AIT enthusiasts are just trying to use half information from outdated genetic studies to peddle their outdated fiction — explaining the genetic similarity between North Indians and Europeans, when such similarity is equally explained by North Indians migrating to Europe. And unlike AIT, this theory actually has newer genetic evidence to back it up without having to go through the logic fallacy of why Europeans would migrate towards India just when the ice age was ending, while Indians could have migrated north as the north got warmer.

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Another common mistake repeated in the above blog is using two parameters — lactose tolerance and the tallness gene — to somehow corroborate AIT. This is patently absurd as both lactose tolerance and tallness genes result in survival advantages to the population and hence cannot be used for studying natural flow of population. All genetic migration studies use SNP, which don’t give any survival advantage, instead of genes which do give some advantage. Does it come as a surprise that all genetic studies use SNPs?

Let’s say a population of mixed tall and short individuals from Punjab crosses the Steppes of Central Asia to go to Europe. The Steppes, being a more hostile environment, would have huge selection pressure towards taller individuals. So when the population crosses the Steppes, the tall population would be selected against the short — and when the population reaches Europe, it would be almost entirely tall. Now let’s reverse the scenario where Europe is the origin of the tallness gene and it crosses the Steppes into Punjab. Since most of the population in Punjab is already short or mixed (as per AIT), the invading migrants with their tall genes would mix with the short Punjab people. Punjab plains being less hostile than the Steppes might not have the same selection pressure, and so the tall genes would get diluted by mixing. In both scenarios, Punjab has a mixture of short and tall and Europe has tall — so tallness gene distribution cannot provide a definitive answer to the direction of movement. This is why population genetics and migration studies are done using SNPs which don’t confer or alter survival benefits.

All in all, AIT enthusiasts have limited time left to enjoy their falsehoods as new genetic studies will settle this debate once and for all. The fact that AIT was broadly accepted forced earlier genetic studies to match their findings and present results to corroborate the existing consensus. This happened as genetics could not speak about migration direction ten years ago. But it has changed now and we should see definitive and conclusive answers in the future.

April 3, 2016
Aryan Invasion Theory: Other debunking evidences (Part III)

While the Aryan Invasion Theory/Aryan Migration Theory has been debunked beyond doubt by genetics, its proponents still try to claim ambiguity on other grounds — linguistics, archaeology, mythology etc. — similar to how creationists claim that Creationism is as plausible an explanation as Evolution.

Linguistics evidence

Since genetics debunks AIT/AMT, linguistic arguments are the first refuge for the AIT/AMT apologists. The reasoning is that the similarity between North Indian and European languages means Aryan invasion or migration must have happened. However, the problem with this assertion is that it derives its conclusion from partial information. The similarity of languages could have come from migration on either side — one cannot claim that Europe is the origin for the Indo-Aryan language family based on similarity of Indo-European languages alone. The British, who first propounded AIT/AMT, didn’t like the idea that the west might have had its origin from Indians, so they postulated that Europe gave rise to Indian languages and culture — and this is exactly what people trained in leftist and Marxist schools push even today.

However, recent analysis on linguistics is also making life difficult for AIT/AMT proponents. Recent studies show that Sanskrit has more in common with the proto Indo-European language — which gave rise to the Indo-European language family — than any other European language.

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The most important finding from linguistic reconstruction is that Sanskrit has the most in common with the proto Indo-European language, and not the Central Asian or Eastern European languages. For example, Childe gives 72 basic cognate proto Indo-European words constructed scientifically, of which Sanskrit has 70 words, German 46 words, Baltic 23 words, Slavic 16 words, and Greek 48 words. Sanskrit is the only Aryan language besides proto Indo-European to have retained three genders, three numbers and eight cases intact.

Another evidence is presented using ancient mythologies. When you compare Greek and Vedic mythologies, there are many common elements. Similarly, German and Vedic mythologies share many common elements. But if you compare German and Greek, there are no common elements — meaning Sanskrit and Vedic mythology is the common element connecting the European language tree and mythologies. Also, Iranian Mythology has common elements only with Vedic mythology. But according to AIT, Aryans came from South Russia to Central Asia and then separated in Iran. This cannot be the case when Iranian mythology has nothing in common with any other European mythology of that time.

Archaeological evidence

The initial basis for AIT was based on the claim by Mortimer Wheeler when he found some skulls in archaeological sites around Harappa and used them to support AIT by claiming the skulls belonged to Dravidians killed by invading Aryans. However, subsequent archaeological research showed that the skulls were mere burial sites of IVC people and not the result of any fighting between invading armies and locals. In fact, there is no archaeological proof that any kind of invasion ever took place. This is the reason AIT proponents have recently changed their stand to Aryan Migration Theory — much like how creationists changed their theory to “Intelligent Design” keeping all but the name. But unfortunately for the proponents of AMT/AIT, even AMT falls flat on the archaeological evidence: there is no archaeological evidence for any kind of migration into IVC either.

Another popular argument used by the AMT/AIT side is that IVC had no chariots and it was the Aryans who brought chariots and horses into India. This is a preposterous claim. India is protected from the north and north-west by the Hindukush, and any invader had to overcome it. The Greeks, who were known for their chariots, had to leave them behind when Alexander invaded India. So it is nothing more than wishful thinking to assume that nomadic barbarians from Central Asia could have achieved the feat of bringing chariots into India through the Hindukush two thousand years before Alexander — something that even he didn’t achieve. Michael Danino presents detailed evidence showing that horses were present in India much before the supposed Aryan invasion, and some recent studies actually claim horses are native to India.

Ice Age evidence

The world came out of the last ice age roughly around 10,000–12,000 years ago. India was not affected by the ice age to the same extent as Europe and Central Asia because of the presence of the Himalayas to the north. So the population living in India at that time could have easily migrated north towards Central Asia and then Europe as the ice age began to end and glaciers began retreating. This is consistent with what is observed in the genetic studies.

However, AIT/AMT posits the opposite direction for migration. Why would Europeans and Central Asians, who were by then accustomed to ice-covered climate, migrate south into India specially at a time when the ice age had ended and the climate was getting hotter? It makes no sense that people who lived and survived in the ice-covered plains of Europe and Central Asia would abandon their native land specially at a time when it was turning greener and food was getting plentiful. Also, the cold temperature during the Ice Age would have supported smaller populations in Central Asia compared to India. So migration would have been possible only from the high-density area of India to Central Asia and Europe — not the other way around.

Cultural perspective

The latest attempt by AMT/AIT pushers is the theory of cultural assimilation — this way they don’t have to present any genetic or archaeological evidence, merely stating their assertions are true. As per this version, Aryans were not invaders but a small number of migrants — too small to be detected by any genetic or archaeological evidence — who over a very large period of time successfully managed to force millions of people living in IVC to give up their religion and language in favour of Indo-European languages and gods.

This is by far the most absurd explanation for the Aryan Invasion Theory — it assumes that millions of Dravidians living in IVC, which was at that time the most populous region on the planet, had no good language or religion of their own and thus gave up their own civilisation and copied the few hundred migrating Aryans whose numbers were so low that current archaeology or genetic studies can barely detect them. Many people prefer such mental gymnastics rather than the much simpler explanation that the Aryan invasion or migration never happened and that the Aryan-Dravidian divide was an artificial construct of the British.

Even after all these attempts, the Aryan Invasion Theory leaves behind many more questions than it solves. There are crores of temples for Dravidian Gods — Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma — all over India, while the Aryan gods — Indra, Varuna, Vayu, Agni etc. — have very few temples dedicated to them. Unless one is wilfully disingenuous, it makes no sense that the Aryan invaders or migrants who supposedly defeated the Dravidians would have adopted the gods of the Dravidians as the primordial deities above their own Indra or Vayu.

This brings to an end this series of articles. The articles here have tried to debunk the most common arguments used by the supporters of AIT/AMT. Given the amount of propaganda and politics which supports the pro-AIT lobby, the mounting evidence against this theory will take some time to change things on the ground. Till that happens, the job of debunking this theory should continue at all levels.

January 24, 2016
Aryan Invasion Theory: The Genetics (Part II)

Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) has been debunked by almost all of the recent datasets and studies on genetics, linguistics, mythology/religion and archaeology. Yet this theory keeps cropping up in one form or other, especially in its milder form as the Aryan Migration Theory (AMT) — which is just the invasion theory rephrased as migration due to the lack of any archaeological evidence for invasion in the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) at 1500 BC. Most often, the proponents of AIT or AMT cite either outdated studies or half-truths to push their ideas. The most blatant case of misinformation is from the field of genetics — which unlike linguistics is a hard science with little room for guesswork.

One of the most often used justifications for AIT is that North Indians have genetics similar to Europeans and hence this theory is true. The proponents even cite various genetics studies to show this point. However, this is a classic case of presenting half-truths. This similarity is higher between North Indians and Europeans than between South Indians and Europeans. While this genetic similarity does show that Indians and Europeans are related, it fails to show the direction of that relationship — it does not give information on whether Indians migrated to Europe or Europeans migrated into India. The proponents of AIT just push invasion from Central Asia and Europe as per their pre-conceived notions, and are almost always silent on the time period of this invasion or migration.

But unfortunately for AIT proponents, deeper genetic studies can now give the direction of movement of population as well as the time period for this mixing. The recent studies on the genetics of R1a1 Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA studies have helped understand the migration pattern of humans during the late Holocene period better. Y chromosome is found only among males and is inherited only by sons, giving valuable insight into patrilineal gene flow. Mitochondrial DNA is exclusively derived from the mother, helping understand matrilineal gene flow. By tracing Y chromosomes, one can trace the fathers and grandfathers of a group; by tracing mitochondrial DNA, one can trace the mothers and grandmothers.

Lucotte G. is one such major study on genetics which studies the distribution pattern of R1a1 haplotype in detail among Europeans, Central Asians and Indians. The principle behind this study is that newer groups of people would have far fewer variations among them while older population groups would have a higher frequency of variations. This is how modern humans’ ancestry is traced back to Africans — because Africans have the highest amount of genetic variations among all groups of people today.

In the present study we have extended the field of detection of haplotype XI/haplogroup R1a… We found high haplotype XI frequencies values in Afghanistan (18.4%), in Iran (26.5%), in Pakistan (28% and 30.4%) and in India; in this last subcontinent, the maximal value of 61.3% was found in Punjab… Datations show that the Z93 Pakistano-Indian group is the most ancient (about 15.5K years); in Europe, the Eastern populations are the most ancient (about 12.5K years) and the Northern ones the most recent (about 6.9K years).

— Lucotte G., study on R1a1 haplotype distribution

So the data gives evidence that the R1a1 found in Punjab is the oldest, the Central European haplotype is in the middle, and the Northern European R1a haplotype is the youngest. This pretty much buries the Aryan invasion and migration theories — if AIT or AMT were true, we would have seen from the genetic results that the Eastern European haplotype is the oldest and the Indian haplotype is the youngest, since AIT claims Europeans came as invaders/migrants to North India. The study states that Central/Eastern European population is 12.5k years old while Northern European population is 6.9k years old — and the Punjabi/North Indian population is at least 15.5k years old.

As per Aryan Invasion Theory, IVC ended because of migration or invasion by Aryans around 1500 BC — 4,000 years ago. In the light of the above and similar genetic studies, the Aryan Invasion Theory is off the mark by at least 10,000 years. Since North Indian population is at least 15,000 years old, the claim that Hinduism is not native to India falls flat on its face — it makes Hinduism indigenous to India and India alone.

The actual population composition of India

As per the latest genetic studies, population of India is derived from two separate population groups — ANI (Ancestral North Indians) and ASI (Ancestral South Indians). The data suggests that ANI came to India at around 60,000 BC and ASI at around 45,000 BC. But the ANI and ASI are not synonymous with Aryans and Dravidians as some AMT/AIT enthusiasts try to make it seem. North Indians on average have about 60% ANI genes and 40% ASI genes while South Indians on average have 40% ANI and 60% ASI. The South and North Indian names for ASI and ANI denote their relative contribution to each group — not distinct Aryan or Dravidian entities. This is also the reason why South Indians share genetic similarity with Europeans. Since North Indians share 40% genetic material with South Indians, and Europeans share 60–70% genetic similarity with North Indians, Europeans have 20–30% genetic commonality with South Indians. This mixture of North and South Indian ancestors must have happened before 12,000 years ago — only then would South Indians share the DNA of Europeans. This also puts to rest the theory that Aryan invaders became upper castes and Dravidians became lower castes, as Hinduism originated roughly 5,000 years back — almost 10,000 years after the ANI and ASI had mixed.

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ANI migrations

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ASI migrations

Technical summary on using genetics for dating migration patterns

The first part is sample selection — random samples are taken from a selected population group and a particular gene loci is selected to study. Gene loci have multiple expressions. SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) are changes in a gene at a single nucleotide that do not change the behaviour of the gene significantly, producing no discernible phenotype difference. Because SNPs don’t confer any genetic advantages, they can be used as tools for studying distribution and migration of populations. A tallness gene, by contrast, cannot be used for studying migrations because survival advantages would confound the study.

Let’s say there is a parent population A with a gene called R1a1, present in a place called X. After a few centuries, a sub-group of population A moves from place X to a new place Y. Since X is far from Y, any new mutations in A at X won’t be found in the population at Y. So while new mutations might occur in Y, X will have more variety of variations as the parent population. The higher the degree of variations in the genetics, the older the population must be. This is how scientists concluded that modern humans came out of Africa — because of the highest density of variations there.

When scientists study X and Y populations and their SNPs, the population with a higher density of variations is the older one. This is how the above mentioned study by Lucotte concluded that Punjab, with the highest density of R1a, is the oldest population group among those studied.

Other References:

1. European Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 18, No. 4 — R1a1 M458 chromosomes speak against substantial patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, including India, at least since the mid-Holocene.

2. Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 54, No. 1 — Highest frequency (up to 72.22%) of Y-haplogroup R1a1* in Brahmins suggested as a founder lineage, with extended phylogenetic analyses supporting autochthonous origin of R1a1 lineage in India.

3. Indian Academy of Sciences study — Among R1a1a*(xM458) chromosomes, “the highest diversity is observed among populations of the Indus Valley yielding coalescent times above 14 KYA”, declining toward Europe where maximum diversity and coalescent times of 11.2 KYA are observed in Poland, Slovakia and Crete.

January 23, 2016