Quote:India’s caste system descended from two tribes ‘not colonialism’

Mark Henderson Science Editor



Genetic profiling shows that the structure of Indian society today reflects early social groupings, not just colonialism India’s caste system is not a relic of colonialism but has existed in some form for thousands of years, the most comprehensive study yet of the genetic diversity of the sub-continent has suggested.



The genetic profiles typical of modern castes are indistinguishable from those of much older tribal groups, Indian and American scientists have found. This suggests that they emerged from populations of shared ancestry who have married among themselves for many generations.



The researchers wrote in the journal Nature: “Some historians have argued that caste in modern India is an ‘invention’ of colonialism, in the sense that it became more rigid under colonial rule. However, our results indicate that many current distinctions among groups are ancient and that strong endogamy [marriage within a group] must have shaped marriage patterns in India for thousands of years.”



Kumarasamy Thangaraj, of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, and a leader of the study, said: “It is impossible to distinguish castes from tribes using the data. The genetics proves that they are not systematically different. This supports the view that castes grew directly out of tribal-like organisations during the formation of Indian society.”



Researchers analysed more than 500,000 genetic markers from 132 people from 25 different groups.



The research established that modern Indians of all castes are descended from two ancestral groups.



Indians can trace between 39 per cent and 71 per cent of their ancestry to a population known as the Ancestral Northern Indians (ANI), who are quite closely related to Europeans and Asians. Those with a higher ancestral contribution from the ANI group are more likely to belong to higher castes, and to speak Indo-European languages such as Hindi and Bengali.



The other ancient population are the Ancestral Southern Indians (ASI), who are not genetically close to any group outside the sub-continent. People with a higher ASI ancestry are more likely to belong to lower castes, and to speak non Indo-European languages such as Tamil.



The research, by scientists from CCMB in India and Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, has also established that Indians are much more genetically diverse than Europeans.



This result indicates that many modern Indian groups are descended from a small number of “founding individuals”, whose descendants interbred among themselves to create genetically isolated populations.



Lalji Singh, director of CCMB, said: “India is genetically not a single large population, but instead is best described as many smaller isolated populations.”



This insight has important medical implications for people of Indian origin, because groups that are descended from small founding populations often have a high incidence of inherited diseases. Ashkenazi Jews, for example, have a high risk of Tay-Sachs disease.



This may explain why several genetic conditions are more common in India than elsewhere: a mutation in a gene called MYBPC3, which raises the risk of heart failure sevenfold, is found in 4 per cent of Indians but is exceptionally rare elsewhere.



The only ethnic group who do not have this shared ancestry is the indigenous population of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, who appear to be of exclusively ASI descent.



Nick Patterson, of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, said: “The Andamanese are unique. Understanding their origins provides a window on to the history of the Ancestral South Indians, and the period tens of thousands of years ago when they diverged from other Eurasians.”



Mr Singh added: “Our project to sample the disappearing tribes of the Andaman Islands has been more successful than we could have hoped, as the Andamanese are the only surviving remnant of the ancient colonisers of South Asia.”



Aravinda Chakravarti, of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, wrote in a commentary for Nature: “Greater ANI ancestry is significantly associated with Indo-European speakers and with traditionally ‘higher’ caste membership. This provides a model of how diversity within India came about. As such, its details are imperfect and will surely be contested, revised and improved.



“Caste and custom may be strong barriers between groups, perhaps even today. But the common shared ancestry and rampant ANI/ASI mixture may be the strong, invisible thread that binds all Indians.”

Quote:I had summarized a theory here http://[..] from Madhya-Asia ki Itihas, Vol 1, pgs57-73



1. The ancestors of indo-europeans (IE) and munda-dravids come out of south asia and/or south east asia in the paleolithic.



2. Both IE and munda-dravids are in central asia but the former under pressure from the latter, or of natural causes, leave central asia towards west eurasia in the neolithic. These IE are kentum. (between 12,000 to 10,000bc). You could call them IE or proto IE or preproto IE. [Edit: This is would be Anathony's forragers]



3. In Europe there is split around the Danube between the Shatam and Kentum branches. In the upper chalcolithic the Shatam branch separates and starts moving east. He says this separation is prior to agriculture since agricultural terms are not common, but animal husbandry, relationships, fauna, etc are. [Corded Ware, on the other hand, though mainly pastoral does show evidence of agriculture. They must have domesticated the horse sometime in this period in the eastern European steppe. ] [Edit: This split would be close to Anthony's Farmers meet Foragers period]



4. The Shatam branch he calls Shakaraya, who, by the late chalcolithic, divide into two - the nomadic Shak between the Danube & the Altai and the settled Arya, the line of division is the latitude near Syr-darya/aral. The Arya are in Bactria, Khorasan, etc and move over time to east iran and the indo-gangetic plains.

The Shak nomads that are spread from the Danube to the Altai he calls the ancestor of the Slavs.



5. The Shak, starting in the iron age, steadily move into south-asia under Hunnic pressure, and leave an cultural imprint over the Aryas. (900BC)



Most of the material has been drawn from primary Russian sources. In the introduction Rahul writes: "I undertook this arduous task as a challenge as no such history of Central Asia was available. Moreover, this history is intimately connected with the history of India. I collected major documentation for this work during my stay in Soviet Russia, from 1945 to 1947." Although he did not have any formal education, the University of Leningrad appointed him Professor of Indology in 1937-38 and again in 1947-48.



In Sankrtyayan's book on central asia - he does not say the languages - IE, Munda, Dravid, developed in the paleolithic, just theorizes that people speaking these languages in the neolithic are descended of paleolithic south-asians and/or southeast Asians. He mentions cave-shadow mummies that had been procured by the Russians for anthropological research. He relies on linguistics to develop separation nodes. Even today there are remnants of Kentum in the Himalayas, and the Kentum Tukhara existed as late as a 1000 years ago in the trans-Himalaya.