Stark Truth About Humans: a story of India

Science will fall, but also rise (part 2 of 2)

This is the conclusion of a two-part examination of the demographic history of India, and the history of the demographic history of India. Find part one here.

Scions of Indra

Using dozens of ancient remains from Central Asia’s Sintasha culture that date to 1800 B.C. David Reich’s group has shown that people in the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) did not carry this heritage of people on the Eurasian steppe, while modern Indians usually do (see above). On the whole, aggregating across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and replicating the methods used by the Reich lab, including their model framework, I estimate that about 15% of the ancestry among modern South Asians can be attributed to people from the steppe. In the Northwest, it is closer to 25%. Among Brahmins all across the North, the figure hovers around 30% as well, while in the South Brahmins are 20% steppe. Peasants in the Gangetic plain are closer to 15% steppe. Dalits in the North have less than non-Dalit cultivators, while Dalits and tribal people in the South have almost no steppe ancestry (within South Asia, the Jatt farmers of Punjab seem to be the native group with the most steppe ancestry).

Though more will be clarified in the future as ancient DNA within India emerges and undergoes analysis, the broad outlines are in place. We can place every Indian on a chart that estimates their contribution from the three ancestral streams: steppe, IVC, and “Ancient Ancestral South Indian” (AASI).